Lyrical Television

Lyric poetry has ancient roots. Aristotle distinguished the lyrical as one of the three broad categories of poetry (along with the dramatic and the epic). Over the centuries, many have attempted precise defi nitions of the lyric/lyrical, but most would agree with the classic understanding of the lyric as “a brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating for the reader a single, unifi ed impression.” Most defi nitions also specify that the lyric poem is an openly subjective expression of the poet. P. Adams Sitney was perhaps the fi rst fi lm scholar to understand that while the commercial motion picture is generally dramatic and/or epic, cinema has its own lyric tradition, epitomized by the fi lms of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie. Sitney’s defi nition of the cinematic lyric: