Pierre Garnier (1928–2014) and Ilse Garnier (1927–2020) are best known as the inventors of a new, visual, and phonic poetry called spatialism in the early 1960s. Spatialism sees words as objects to be combined on the space of the page. It exists primarily in the form of visual and sound poetry, but its contribution to cinema is also noteworthy.
 
In the latter field, Pierre and Ilse Garnier’s creative output forms a very rich body of work: texts on cinema, screenplay, video project, animation, and “cinematographic poem.” And yet, this work has been long ignored, partly because the poets never made a film that was screened in public, and partly because the spatialist cinema they imagined is not a narrative form of cinema, but rather an experimental one: It consists of filmed poems that were intended to be projected onto screens and that may or may not be accompanied by sound poems.
 
The spatialists’ creative output for cinema is described and analyzed here for the first time. Four aspects of their work are dealt with in the book’s four chapters. The first chapter describes what led the poets toward the medium of cinema. The spatialist poets’ interest in cinema was rooted in their conception of poetry as a kinetic practice: They saw movement, light, space, and the medium as essential not only to the poem’s creation, but also to its decipherment. The second chapter shows how the poets used cinema in their writing, primarily in their work for the stage. Thus, their theatrical plays utilize projections of films or slides onto screens during their performances. The third and fourth chapters analyze how the two poets created work for the cinema, or rather animated images in the broad sense. Pierre Garnier produced works for video and animation: They consisted of collections of visual poems intended to be flicked through quickly to give the reader the impression of images in movement, as well as unpublished drawings discovered in archives. Ilse Garnier constructed an original form of cinema-poetry, which constitutes the most ambitious aspect of the spatialist poets’ involvement in cinema: Notably, she created two artist’s books, in which drawings, poems, and photographs—intended to be filmed—are accompanied by comments aimed at a director. A video has been produced by two artists (without input from Ilse Garnier) based on these two artist’s books and is available at https://vimeo.com/183284925.
 
This book analyzes an unknown aspect of their work and contributes not only to the knowledge of spatialism, but also to the history of cinema and the avant-garde.

 

(Written by Marianne Simon-Oikawa, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2021)

Related Info

Book review:
Jan Baetens “Pierre et Ilse Garnier, poètes-spatialistes ?”  (Ubique and Unique Book Pt. 1 vol.20, No.1  2019年4月3日)
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/2085
 
Marie Martin “Le cinéma projeté des poètes spatialistes”  (AVRIL volume 20, NUMÉRO 4,  2019)
https://www.fabula.org/acta/document12138.php

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