2

I've hardly alluded to this project. Now it's time to show how ambitious it is. That's apparent from the title the collection's been given, since it's already been used by an earlier work. Not a book, it's true, but a film: the film Jean-Luc Godard shot in 1962 in Paris, starring Anna Karina. And it's not just a matter of homonymy between the two. We must consider whether the film isn't well and truly the book's eponym. However, as Baetens warns us right away, it's not, or at least not only, about a transposition into verse of the film in question. I'll address what takes place in particular between My Life to Live - the book and My Life to Live - the film in the third part of this essay. Right now what interests me is to reflect for a few moments on the two works' relationship with one another in general, and on the way this relationship is put into practice, as Baetens conceives it.

The relationship between a film-as-source and a book-as-result is called "novellisation" in French. This barbarous term comes from the English novelization. In English, its meaning is at the same time clearer and more precise: since the word novel corresponds to what in French is called roman, novelization designates the novelistic or, in French, romanesque, adaptation of a film. Baetens, who has been studying this body of work for a long time, has portrayed it as a genre with roots in the 1910's (notably in the magazine appearances of Vampires by Georges Meirs, published alongside the movie serial of the same name, directed by Louis Feuillade and much more celebrated), and which, since then, has been relegated to mass culture, as a derivative commercial product responding to simple and rigid constraints6.

However, since we envision the possibility of considering novelizations as counterparts of film adaptations of literary works, no obstacle of any aesthetic sort prevents the genre from rising to the most legitimate ranks of artistic endeavor, or the book from asserting its intentions. Only, in this case, the model of adaptation quickly turns too restrictive. Baetens established the procedure in a programmatic text7, as follows: "A successful (film) adaptation, the history of the genre amply proves, can permit itself a great deal of license with respect to the literary model that furnishes its point of departure. Future novelizations would do well to seize hold of a film with as much cheekiness, in order to concentrate on other aspects than just fidelity or equivalence. In other words: a novelization has to get rid of false constraints, so as to give itself a more stimulating freshness." (p. 13)

Following that reasoning, I'd like to recall moreover the obvious fact that the novel, although eminently protean, isn't the only literary genre known. As a consequence, the literary adaptation of a film needn't limit itself to the phenomenon of "novelization," in the literal sense that English grants it. It could equally take the form of a short story, a play, an essay, a photo-novel, a comic strip, or, I conclude, eager to confirm it, naturally, a poem8.

Finally, it should be noted that, according to the same class of obvious facts, there are also several genres in the domain of cinema. Fiction films are certainly no less dominant and diverse there than the novel is in the literary domain. Nearby, though, other genres flourish, whose connection with literary genres, although approximate, is inevitable. I won't list them, in order to focus on just one, the poetic genre. Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a fundamental text on this topic entitled "The Cinema of Poetry" 9. I remember two of his points: a refutation of the existence of a filmic grammar that rigorously and accurately controls the unfolding of the narrative; a plea for a "free indirect subjective" image capable of rendering indistinct the objective point of view (that registered by the camera) and the subjective point of view (that attributed to some somebody). These two positions of Pasolini's, one negative, the other positive, come together in assuming that the image prevails over narrative.

A similar prevalence animates Jan Baetens' collection. Hasn't he included a sentence fragment about the image of these images of her in the book's incipit? We sense then how he will reshape the process of novelization. While the genre ordinarily, almost exclusively, retains a film’s narrative thread by relying on its dialogue and scenario, he highlights the images Godard composed. And he can do that because poetry is precisely where film images and verbal images diverge; by other means, it's the pursuit of a poetic imaginary of the everyday10.

I'd like to slip in here a digression of a rather speculative sort -- what do you want, we never change. Perhaps you already knew that Jan Baetens, when he's not writing poetry books, is engaged in university teaching and research. At his university, courses are taught in Dutch, but research, for the most part, is carried out in the orbit of the anglophone intellectual world. This may explain how the specific area of his research is designated by an English expression with no real equivalent in French -- cultural studies. Novelization is typical of the subject matter of interest in cultural studies: it's a cultural object in the broadest sense, despised by the most institutionalized legitimizing forces (French literature courses, the academies, leather-bound books, review pages in the papers. etc.) because of its hybridity and reliance on an earlier work. But while cultural studies is situated, along with its subjects, on the margins of cultural legitimacy, in actual practice it claims an interest in the heart of the matter. In so doing, it reserves for hybridity and dependence (soon redirected as interdependence) a central space in the cultural system. In addition, to put into verse a story imagined beforehand by a film isn't about exhibiting a vaguely intellectual, eccentric ingenuity; nor is it for dressing up poetry in aristocratic and extreme forms; but it is about trying to return poetry to the heart of the matter, where cinema has long been found. From this perspective, it makes no sense to pose as a poet; in any case, it's pointless to write poetry with a capital P. On the contrary, we must try to dissolve poetic prerogatives in the happy, sparkling banality of culture. Thus it would be wrong, I think, to take Jan Baetens for an academic who, in idle moments, is trying to extend his ambitions into the field of Art, but rather his poetic activity and his research in the cultural studies domain should be considered, together, as the committed work of a "humanist" -- the word's pretty outdated, I agree, but I don't suppose that "culturist," signifying, ironically, something else entirely, is any more satisfying.

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