Cellulose nitrate was introduced in 1889, and used until the 1950s as the – frighteningly flammable – basis of film stock. Simon Perril’s new book of poems is a meditation upon the birth of the moving picture, the allure of the film still, the aesthetics of the early horror film, and the contemporary `intermission’ that moors us out of time. Its touchstones are the chronophotographs of E.J. Marey and the cinematic `essays’ of film-maker Chris Marker. Marey’s experiments in understanding motion inadvertently contributed to the origins of film, but also, more darkly, to the industrial management of work and time. In a book of three markedly different sections, Perril explores these connections in poems as luminous and flammable as the films to which they pay homage.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
Nitratean essay on cinema
Thoughts on Vivisection
Varieties of Cinematic Experience
Everything is Subject to Motion, and Everything is Motion’s Subject
“to transpose life . . .”
A Halo around Here
The End of Portraiture
Stations across Shape
The Islands of Dr Marey
Succession
Dead Pan
Patent Graft
The Shuffling Deck
The first Audiences Reported Feelings of Sea-Sickness
Cenatograph
Melomania
Possessive Apostrophe
Monochrome
Marey’s Revolver
Ovid on Nitrate
Cursed Hands
On Looking Into a Still From Murnau’s Nosferatu
Fear’s Franchise
Ode on Universal Horror
Masque
Still Lifetime
Death by Snowflake
Reported Sighting
Fatalities of the Silent Image
Eye’s Pupil
The Intermission
Preamble
Venture
The Intermission
Destroy all Monsters
Standard Life Crisis
On Being Turbulent
Untitled
The Disposition of Objects in Early Parenthood
Amplifier Worship
Lines on Verlaine
In Gorky’s The Artist and his Mother, three of the four hands are gloved
The Case of the Haunted Chill Cabinet
Ode to Quandary
Grazing
Daylight Robbery
No Valuables Left Overnight
Personal Possessions
Interior Design
Death by Snowflake
Lycantrope
forward
Blue Profile
Possibilis Salutis: a Prologue
The Afterlife of the New Werther
Afterward
Credits
