Abstract
In this chapter I scrutinize a short though enigmatic expression: “Space. Captured Life. Life of the Depth.” It is drawn from the manifesto “The ABCs of Cinema” written in the course of four years (1917–1921) by the Swiss-born modernist poet Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961). Even though the word “documentary” was not explicitly placed at the epicenter of Cendrars’s cinematic attention, I argue not only that this poetic enunciation stands for a deeply rooted ontological feature of documentariness. Further, and more poignantly, it dialogues (though obliquely and obliviously) with a deep documentary principle that emerged synchronously with Dziga Vertov’s documentary doctrine: a sign of its definitional strength and relevancy across time and space.
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Notes
- 1.
Humphreys (2003) writes that Cendrars (born Frédéric-Louis Sauser) was a “Swiss writer, active in France. He attended schools in Naples, Basel and Neuchâtel and worked in St. Petersburg for a watchmaker from 1904 to 1907, when he began studying philosophy and medicine. He lived on a farm in France, worked as a comedian in Brussels and visited New York in 1912 before moving in the same year to Paris. There he published his first major collection of poems, Les Pâques (Paris, 1912), under a pseudonym based on an elaborate series of puns on braise (embers), cendres (ashes), art and arson. He was acquainted with many members of the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde including Chagall, Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Cocteau and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Cendrars also wrote an article on the Douanier Rousseau and translated Apollinaire’s ‘Méditations esthétiques’ for the German review Der Sturm. He founded a magazine, Les Hommes nouveaux, using the name also for a publishing house, which made available his first long poems, including the remarkable La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Paris, 1913); this was a folding sheet of 12 panels 2 m long, with Cendrars’s ‘simultaneist’ poem and an abstract design in ‘simultaneous colours’ by Sonia Delaunay providing verbal and visual contrasts and a fragmentary experience of movement through the modern world.”
- 2.
Dickow (2016, 52) argues that Cendrars, a student of philosophy and medicine in training, is situated in “a space of excess, exuberance, and vitality.”
- 3.
See further treatment of Direct Cinema and Cinéma-Vérité definitions of documentary in Volume II of this set.
- 4.
Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye” (1984a [1924], 41).
- 5.
- 6.
For Vertov’s discussion on Essence, see, for example, Vertov (1984b [1924], 47).
Works Cited and Further Reading
Cendrars, Blaise. 1987. In Paris ma ville, ed. Fernand Léger. Paris: Bibliothèque des arts.
———. 1992. The ABCs of Cinema. In Modernities and Other Writings, trans. Esther Allen and Monique Chefdor, 25–29. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Dickow, Alexander. 2016. Life and the Literary in Blaise Cendrars’ ‘L’Oiseau bleu’. The Explicator 74 (1): 51–54.
Geva, Dan. 2018. Toward a Philosophy of the Documentarian: A Prolegomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hicks, Jeremy. 2007. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. New York: I.B. Tauris.
Humphreys, Richard. 2003. Cendrars, Blaise. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T015184. Last accessed December 20, 2019.
Modernities and Other Writings. 1995. In Correspondance, 1934–1979: 45 ans d’amitié, ed. Henry Miller, Miriam Cendrars, and Jay Bochner. Paris: Éditions Denoël.
———. 2014. The ABCs of Cinema. In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, ed. Scott MacKenzie, 20–23. Berkeley: University of California Press. [1917–1921].
Vertov, Dziga. 1966. To the End of the World. New York: Grove Press.
———. 1984a [1924]. Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, 47. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1984b [1924]. The Birth of Kino-Eye. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, 40–42. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Geva, D. (2021). 1917–1921: Blaise Cendrars. In: A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895–1959. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79466-8_7
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