Cinema in Lorca (Xon de Ros)

Apollinaire's 1917 bugle-call for his fellow poets to work in the cinema heralded an artistic association that would have a lasting impact in the shaping of the European film tradition.

However, among the art forms poetry is arguably the least compatible with cinema, particularly from the current vantage point of a film industry dominated by the action movie. In addition, the narrative drive that the language of film imposes on images puts a limit to their connotative potential. The fact, moreover, that poetry is essentially a linguistic discourse makes it irreducible to the visual image that defines the medium of film. Cinema's emphasis on the visual would have been even more evident during its infancy in the first three decades of the century, before sound became an integral part of the new art. Yet, paradoxically, it was during this period that poetry and film were to be most closely associated. Their affinity was promoted within the circles of the French avantgarde, where lyricism became a key laudatory term in film criticism. According to the influential filmmaker Jean Epstein, cinema was ‘poetry's most powerful medium’, the true incarnation of its verbal artifice. It was a view shared by many critics and cinematographers.

The ascendancy of this movement on their Spanish counterparts may account for the fact that in Spain poetry was to be the literary genre most receptive to the experience of film. Buñuel, who in the mid-1920s had worked as an assistant with Epstein in Paris, was an instrumental figure in this process of artistic fertilization. First contributing film reviews and articles to La Gaceta Literaria, where he was in charge of the cinema section, and then from 1928, through his association with the pioneering Cineclub España, Buñuel's preferences and ideas, shaped in Paris, found a fertile ground among the country's literary figures.