Entre signal reçu et crypté: Pierre Alferi's Poetics of Remediation

Abstract:The contemporary poet Pierre Alferi made a brief but notable foray into experimental filmmaking in the early 2000s. Taking seriously his assertion that when he extends his poetic work into audiovisual formats it is in order to "essayer la même chose avec d'autres moyens" (inTIME 17), this article investigates what Alferi's experimentation across media might clarify about his approach to poetry as, above all, a collection of "moyens." The regular cross-contamination between audiovisual media and literature in Alferi's work has generally been accounted for in light of this poet's unveiled obsession with the celluloid cinematic image: lines of poetry are broken in pursuit of montage effects, the vertical seriality of the poem interpellates that of the film strip, etc. The central objective of this article is to set aside the assumed primacy of film in Alferi's creative imaginary and re-center the discussion of the relationship between poetry and audiovisual media on the more varied media ecology within which his intermedial experiments actually takes place. Through readings of a sequence from the film Intime and of the 1994 poetry collection Kub or, both of which foreground the mediation and re-mediation of images via analog television transmission, I argue that models of remediation that shift images away from the concrete existence of celluloid in fact offer more complex and supple ways of thinking about the influence of image technologies on Alferi's poetics.