Given that Wilkinson’s historical archive is filmic, that ‘your’ is split. In the cinematographic poem the spectator/reader is as much at work as the director/poet. In what serves as a preface we are presented with some lines about cinematic truth:
I do not care for facts— I care for truth ‘The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second’ (Godard)
marionette is montage, in which film reels are presented in the form of what Garrett Stewart calls the photogrammatic freeze-frame. On another page, the impossibility of knowing the full detail of the scandalous events on The Oneida (Hearst’s ship which saw the mysterious death of Thomas Ince) is punned (shooting/shooting) with the citation and pictographic illustration of Étienne-Jules Marey’s ‘chronophotographic gun’ of 1882. What often gets mistaken for truth (mere facts, factoids or opinions on facts) is supplanted by the truth-making procedures of Marey’s technological innovation. Elsewhere the cinematic freeze-frame is poeticised:
Frame: a single image on the strip of filman illusion of movement is created by the spectator plot frames stutter
The repetition ‘ve…ve…’ (echoing the spoken ‘I…I…I…I’) functions here as the cut of the reel, or Real, the hum of the frames clicking over. Repetition is also emptying out. Trails may turn to dust and voices withdraw:
I quaver on light and you say you haven’t lost your voice, have you? at which point the reel unwinds without conclusion for the rest has turned to dust canonical accounts cannot cannot
At the end of the reel, canonical accounts are doubly refused. The double negation mirrors the previous understanding of voice as assigned by the writerly. Davies’s own stammer is written into some of the more visually complex works in the book. In marionette the page is a palimsestual territory, a land of erasure, deletion, stringing, emboldening and receding visibility, pictorial and photogrammatic comings and goings, mishearings and stammers. Like the act, the stammer covers its own missteps, pointing up the deep pathological layers it reveals and englyphing the surface of its own half-articulation. Operating at the micro-cinematic level of the archive, marionette generates its own extracanonical account of the past, and through such engagement new truths emerge.
Media Convergence, Technique
Even if marionette does not say it is a poem, we consider it a poem, and hence we use names like ‘poetic biography’ or ‘feminist documentary poetics’ to describe it. In it we find the operations of other media, converged and remodulated. marionette is not conceptual, strictly speaking, but the media it subsumes (from a courtroom playscript to collage art to photography and an rich array of incorporated visual material) are notably at a stage of convergence (like ekphrasis) that leaves the ‘hangovers’ from each media liable to spatial and temporal disjunction. ‘Chinese Whispers’ references W.J.T. Mitchell’s three stages of ekphrasis, in Picture Theory (1994):
Ekphrasis, then, is a curiosity as eye and ear lie down and fornicate for triplets fear, hope, indifference
‘SHOW PEOPLE: a metapicture’ gives further evidence of this critical engagement with Mitchell. For readers of marionette, the ekphrastic paradigm is a paradigm for Davies’s love life. The triplet here may be Tristanesque or Oedipal, with Ince or Ince-cum-Chaplin as the third party. Staying true to odd numbers, one memorable moment of working-through moves along a five-line staving-off. Its notational configuration is intercalated with letters, with vertical lineation spelling ‘face’ backwards and ‘rule’:
Stave off e Stave off c Stave off a Stave off f Stave off
Stave off r Stave off u Stave off l Stave off e Stave off
the noise the madness the words the language the communication the confusion the mastery the illusion all emotive misunderstandings
the stutter the colour the music the mood the notion the presence the re-use the non-sense all economies of love and hatred
Like many in the book, this is a complex page and takes time: a poetics of the Real frees itself from the stave-line’s vertical rule and turns out to be emancipatory. Is poetry is a law unto itself? Unable to be mastered, marionette inaugurates a poetics of the Real where writing happens around a void, the void of the Subject: the split ‘I’ who does not write the poem but who is the poem. Marion Davies, the poem. Marion Davies, also, the cut of the reel, who escapes the poem (and perhaps even language). Yet, this specific attention to historical particulars has universal address. We can all sympathize with/immerse ourselves in Marion’s world. In this sense, marionette, a masterwork of unrivalled technique, intensive labor and creative novelty, is one of the most unruly and truth-making long poems in the recent history of Australian poetry.
