At the conference at which this paper was presented, two participants made a reference to Guillaume Apollinaire without consulting each other beforehand. François Albera first pointed out that, according to the author of “The New Spirit and the Poets,” poets wanted to be able some day “to mechanize poetry as the world has been mechanized.” For my part, I projected an excerpt of the poem used here as an epigraph and straightforwardly titled “Before the Cinema.” No intention or planning, no machination should be read into this coincidence, which is first and foremost the result of chance.

Still, the coincidence has a certain necessity to it. Indeed, the cinema holds an essential place in the work of the French poet, as Francis Ramirez has shown in a particularly inspired article on the question:

In his poem (the one ending with the famous “My glass broke like a burst of laughter”), Apollinaire lists the variety of terms used during the period to refer to the cinema. In 1917, the vulgum pecus would have said “the cinema” whereas artists (the particular kind that are actors and actresses) would have preferred “the cine,” and “old professors from the provinces,” “the cinematograph.” For the record, here is the complete poem: