Welcome to Poetic Cinema
On light, language, and the purpose of this newsletter
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the way that language and light feel, to me, like two sides of the same coin. Both transfix me in the same ways: the strangeness of their small patterns, their deep reflection of place, how they reveal meaning to our senses. In a way, they are both articulating forces— another word I’ve been chewing over, especially as I spend longer living abroad and learn to speak more languages.
What does it mean to articulate something? To say it clearly or eloquently? To give shape or form to an abstract idea? I was reminded recently of the word’s Latin roots, as articulation in French (when encountered on a sign in a health foods store) means joints. It comes from the Latin verb articulare, meaning to separate into joints. This meaning is often obscured in English, hidden beneath the stronger association with speech— but consider what it means to be articulate versus to be eloquent. Eloquence has a connotation of flow to it; articulation requires precision. It’s about building a sentence or an idea, setting it out in the most precise pieces, snapping linguistic joints into place.
So then why consider light, why consider language, as articulating forces? Language is the more obvious of the two— we use language to literally articulate ourselves, to makes sense of our reality. To put language to something, to give something a name, has a radical and transformative power. Learning another language begins to highlight the edges of reality in new ways— understanding where words come from, how one language calls something differs from another. When you grow up in English, to glance at something is just exactly what it is. Glancing. When you look for that word in French, you find jeter un coup d’œil or jeter un œil, which translate literally as something like to throw a blow of the eye or to throw an eye respectively. Suddenly a verb that was previously unremarkable has new contours to it. This is how language articulates, and re-articulates, our reality.
Light is more abstract, but consider the second meaning of articulate, to “give shape” to a concept or idea. If you’ve ever studied fine art, you know that light is what gives shape to the human body, the human face, to buildings and landscapes and spaces. When you paint, you’re painting light. When you draw, you’re blocking in planes of light and shadow. Think about being up before dawn, in a room that’s totally dark. As the sun begins to rise, the light slowly begins to reveal the space around you. In tones of blue, you begin to make out the shape of a counter, a chair, a table where you will sit and have breakfast. These things still exist in the darkness, but light is what gives them shape, renders them as there to the human eye.
Cinema is an art of light. Poetry is an art of language. One orchestrates the “meaningful arrangement” of sounds, images, and ideas. The other “gives shape” to the spaces, faces, and moments of our lives— but which is which? This is why poetry and cinema have always felt like the same art form to me. Or if not literally the same art form, then something like twin prophetesses, on mirrored rocky outcrops, calling our attention in harmony to precise qualities of the human condition. In both forms, we lay out disparate elements in a particular order and through this process create beauty, or truth, or both. In poetry, it’s the joining together of lines, the articulation of words and phrases and images and ideas. In cinema, it’s the arrangement of individual shots and scenes, the juxtaposition of one image with another to create meaning, to inspire feeling— to surprise, enchant, shock, endear, remind.
The idea of this newsletter is to put light in conversation with language and see what happens as each begins to speak to and with the other. Every month, I’ll write about a a poem and a piece of cinema that in some way fit together, using each to tease out new meanings in the other. I have only a vague sense of where this will ultimately take us, but I suspect it will involve deep dives into elements of language, some creative contemplation of grammar, frequent crossing of visual and linguistic wires, enthusiastic forays into languages other than English, meditations on the moments of humanity that operate at the core of both poetry and cinema, and probably far too many em dashes. If any of that strikes your fancy, please subscribe to follow along.
The first full post— on Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire & Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Syntax”— will be up next week.