The cinema of Bernadette Mayer

The Cinema of Bernadette Mayer begins with the proposition that the American poet Bernadette Mayer(1945–2022) was a filmmaker of sorts. This study investigates the problem oftotal representation in Mayer’s major time-structured books from the 1970s: Memory;Studying Hunger; Midwinter Day; and The Desires ofMothers to Please Others in Letters. To varying degrees, these worksimpose durational constraints to frame a radically inclusive experimentalpoetics that attempts to record everything from the author’s shifting states ofmind to her daily childcare routines. I use a comparative analysis grounded inclose readings to trace how Mayer’s poetic ambition “to leave all out toinclude all,” as she puts it in Memory, is orientated by questions posedby film and psychoanalytic theory. While standard accounts of the relationshipbetween poetry and cinema tend to invoke the poem as a privileged metaphor fornon-narrative or subjectively expressive films, this study explores how Mayer’spoetics take shape in what film historian Thomas Elsaesser has called a“media/memory constellation” which views cinema not primarily as an assemblageof image-making technologies based on optics, but also as an archival apparatusof inscription, storage, and transmission. Defining cinema broadly as theinterplay between the imaginary and symbolic, I argue that it is at thejuncture of technics and the unconscious that Mayer’s writing, far fromenacting a reductive Freudianism as is sometimes alleged, opens onto what whatJacques Lacan termed the “not-all” (pas tout). In doing so, I repositionMayer’s work from the period as a broader critical engagement with theepistemological, libidinal, and political entanglements that converge aroundthe misguided belief that it is possible to say, write, and record all.