The filmic ghost in the literary machine

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Acknowledgments

Phillipe Met is an associate professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written widely on fantastic literature, modern poetry, and popular culture. He is the author of Formules de la poésie, Études sur Francis Ponge, Michel Leiris, René Char et André du Bouchet (PUF, 1999) and is currently working on two book projects: Subversions of Signs in the Fantastic and Poetics of the Notebook.

Notes

 Qtd in Anne White & Paul Sutton (31).

 Leutrat has pointed out the vampire-like nature of cinema, not just in relation to various art-forms that preceded it in time but because of its intrinsic potential for transfusion, contagion or metamorphosis. See in particular his Vie des fantômes (15–16).

 The French term “parasite” would be equally useful as its semantic field encompasses parasitic organisms or social parasites as well as static (interfering with a radio signal) or snow on a TV monitor.

 Amongst many other things, Poe's tale is precisely about a vampiric process, that of life (Madeline's) consumed by art (the art of portraiture, more specifically) and, naturally, by death.

 All translations in this essay, however imperfect, are my own.

 See the DVD released by Image Entertainment (2001).

 Other things being equal, Marguerite Duras' “murderous relationship with film” is perhaps closer to the sort of reciprocal cannibalization I am trying to outline.

 In Sker, Giraudon's preceding book and a self-labeled “homobiography,” the first and last name of a popular actress of the 1930s are used to christen the narrator (Lilian/e) and her twin brother (Harvey/Hervé) respectively. Liliane keeps a logbook of sorts–a mosaic-like “journal sans bord”: “Named after a body destroyed by sound cinema, I write what I write and nothing else” (12). The montage in Sker then consists in editing, in a filmic rather than literary sense, pages torn out of scattered notebooks or coming loose (70), as well as establishing an acousmatic soundscape that delineates a riddle of the self.

 See also définitif bob by Anne Portugal, one of La Fiancée de Makhno's dedicatees, defined by M. Sheringham as follows: “Each text is a sort of short with bob as both the director and the hero” (214).

 “Les chapitres de ce livre ont été écrits comme on tourne dans le désordre un film qui se construit ensuite au montage.”

 See also in Montage: “[…] dans le tranchant d'un dialogue qui n'aura jamais lieu” [in the sharp impact/trenchant edge of a dialogue that will never exist] (41, emphasis added). Or in Gary Cooper ne lisait pas de livres: "Découpée, mon histoire ralentit dans une succession de plans reliés par un processus mental." [In cut-up form, my narrative progresses more slowly within a succession of shots linked together by a mental process] (9).

 See, for instance, the iconic “bus scene” in his Cat People (1942).

 See his foreword to Des enfants et des monstres: “L'adulte qui voit le monde lui faire défaut ressemble à l'enfant regardant un monstre. L'impossible visible, au chaos qui entr'apparaît. Le monstre, à l'humain de sexe inconnu. Et le cinéaste, à l'enfant souverain.” (13–14). [“An adult seeing the world fail him is like a child gazing on a monster. The visible impossible, like half-gaping chaos. The monster, like a human being of unknown gender. And the filmmaker, like the sovereign child.”] See also in Sentimentale journée Fay Wray's face as “le contrechamp d'un monstre”–the reverse shot of a monster (69).

 With a marked predilection for cult chillers like Village of the Damned (1960) or Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and children's fantasies like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)…

 Écriture à vue can be construed as a derivation of the stage idiom changement à vue, or “transformation scene.”

 Just as with “Mortinsteinck” in Quintane's book, the oscillation between the italicized and non-italicized transcriptions of the name “Sleuth” is indicative of the transformative power of this type of poiesis, which naturally transcends the canonical prose/poetry divide as well as the habitual modes of interaction between the visuel and the écrit.

 “Sleuth is a machine, not a person, not a film–a machine made to crush actors and spectators, a machine set in motion through human agency but now running by itself” (Cinéma 114).