Poetry film

Poetry film is a subgenre of film that fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound. This fusion of image and spoken word (both independent and interdependent) creates what William Wees called the "Poetry-film" genre. He suggested that "a number of avant-garde film and video makers have created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own".^[1] Wees helpfully in his essay ‘Poetry-films and Film Poems’ references ‘poetry-film’ together with the ‘film poem’, as contrasting forms. 'Poetry-films’ contain a whole, or elements of a written or spoken poem, while ‘film poems’ are themselves the ‘poem’. Examples that Wees references include the ‘poetry-film’ ‘L'Étoile de mer’ (1928)  by Man Ray which incorporates fragments of a poem by Robert Desnos, and the ‘film poem’ ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid which does not use and is not based on a poem, but in its structure, its edited images has what Wees calls visual ‘rhyming’ and ‘makes the film a particularly powerful example of film poetry’.