No.1 February 1999
COLLAGE
The Cantos of Ezra Pound is said to be a poetical work written by
collage technique. The fact that the name of technique that was invented
for paintings is also used to describe the name of technique for poetry
tells the magnitude of impact given by the invention.
Collage technique was begun by Picasso and Braque in 1912. While Braque
invented papier colle, a particularized form of collage, in which strips
or fragments of paper are applied to the surface of a painting or drawing,
Picasso discovered collage, a more general technique, which can be described
as the incorporation of any extraneous matter on to the picture surface.(1)
Picasso explained the meaning of the technique in conversation with Francoise
Gilot. "If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us
something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles,
too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not
made and it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness
was what we wanted to make people think about because we are quite aware
that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring."(2)
For such effectiveness it can produce, collage technique acquired universality
as a very useful art technique.
How collage technique that was invented for paintings influenced poetry
seems not clear. Rather, it is conceivable that it was cinematography that
influenced poetry to incorporate collage technique.
Both a poem and a cinematograph has linear structure with time for their
axis. A stanza in poetry corresponds to a shot in cinematography. Accordingly
they are easy to be technically influenced each other.
In 1921, Pound reviewed "Poesies 1917-1920" of Jean Cocteau in
The Dial (January) and claimed that Cocteau wrote a poetry that
belonged to the city intellect. "In a city visual impressions succeed
each other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic " , wrote
Pound in the review. Noel Stock says that this view of Pound may have had
some effect on T. S. Eliot, when later that year he began to write his
"The Waste Land", in which one of the distinguishing marks is
the succession of scenes and impressions, crossing and overlapping.(3)
Although cinematography is supposed to have influenced poetry in such manner,
it is not untill 1925 that cinematography itself established collage technique
(montage technique) by juxtaposition of shots. It was done by Sergei Eisenstein
in Battleship Potemkin.
Pound called his collage technique as ideogrammic method. He developed
this method from his study on Ernest Fenollosa's reflection on chinese
written characters. It seems that he might have studied image presentation
techniques of cinematography and paintings as well in developing his own
method.
Literature cited
1) Golding, John : Cubism, Concepts of Modern Art, Thames and Hudson,
1994, p.62-3.
2)Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake : Life with Picasso, London,
1965, p.70 cited in Golding, op. cit.,p.63.
3) Stock, Noel : The Life of Ezra Pound, North Point Press, 1982,
p.236.
Copyright (C)1999 Hideo Nogami
