Abstract EN:

The relationship between the French poets of the 1910s-1920s and the cinema is a vast and almost virgin field to explore. Indeed, when many researchers, both in literature and in film sudies, have already written on dada and surrealist films, very few have considered the previous generation, that of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. And yet, these poets have shown a remarkably early interest in the new medium : when most intellectuals of their time despised the movies as an amusement for the illerate, modernist poets fantasized about its apparently infinite possibilities. Apollinaire, " prophète médiologique ", in Régis Debray's terms, considers cinema the book of tomorrow and invites the poets to make the most of it. His advice was heard and followed by some of his fellows who wrote articles, scripts, " ciné-poèmes ", " poèmes dans l'espace " and other new forms coined for this purpose. More generally, is not their poetry under the influence of the new medium, as a young director of the time, Jean Epstein, Cendrars's friend, already suggested in 1921 ? If very few films written by poets were actually shot, the phenomenon in itself is fascinating and reflects their passion for modern issues. Indeed, spectatorship echoes the sensorial experience of a citizen at the turn of the century : a quicker, more chaotic, fragmented and disorienting one than in previous phases of human culture. Not only does cinema reflects these phenomena, it arose from and existed in the intertwining of the very components of modernity.