We Saw the Light

“In the postwar America of the fifties and sixties, poets, artists, and filmmakers forged a powerful new counterculture based in friendships, love affairs, intellectual debates, and artistic collaborations. As the author says, ‘What a scene!’ For the first time a critic of great insight has viewed the total dynamics of this artistic world, focusing especially on the cross-pollination between underground filmmakers and poets. The result is explosive and revelatory, as Kane bobs and weaves through films and poems, politics and sexuality, enmities and passions from Anger to Brakhage, Ginsberg to Ashbery, providing not only a sense of history but breathtaking readings of the ways films and poems interbred and crashed against the repressions of American society, turning the fifties into the sixties and beyond. Few books combine such scholarly detail and insight with such passion and humor.”—Tom Gunning, author, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Cinema and Modernity

“In the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers often thought of themselves as poets and frequently invoked the other medium as a model for their own projects. Since then, there has been very little acknowledgment of this kinship, but Daniel Kane's beautifully written book rediscovers it with tremendous erudition and generous attention to the history of both poetics and avant-garde film. With its brilliant structuring metaphor of imaginary conversations between poets and filmmakers, We Saw the Light virtually creates an important field for scholarship.”—David E. James, author, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

“Daniel Kane's We Saw the Light is an original, smart, funny, and profound book. It is in one sense an archaeological dig, uncovering a root work of relations between filmmakers and poets in the post–World War II era; it is also a series of dazzling illuminations exposing fresh historical collaborations. Radical aesthetics combine with social politics, where ‘masculinity,’ ‘sanity,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘poetics’ are not monolithic signifiers but become part of Kane’s mobile ‘conversations’ between poetry and cinema, prompting new ways of seeing and knowing the world and self. Anyone interested in tracking the Beat or New York School of poets in their passion for cinema will want to read this book; anyone wanting to understand filmmakers who sought out their poetic doubles, and the ensuing interstitial fireworks, must read this book: it is like seeing the light for the first time.”—Susan McCabe, author, Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film