Poetry review – SCREEN MEMORIES: Charles Rammelkamp considers Henry Sussman’s poetic account of his lifelong love of cinema
Screen Memories
Henry Sussman
BlazeVOX [Books], 2025
$22.00, 106 pages
ISBN: 978-1609644867
Sandwiched between March 20, 2003, and November 4, 2008, Henry Sussman takes us on a decades-long ride through memories of film-watching, with cultural and personal reflections spliced in. Sussman introduces Screen Memories with the bold declaration: “What follows is a poem blurring the boundaries between cinema and literature.” And, one might add, life. That opening section, one of ten “Screen Memories”, concludes:
my screen memories,
forever seeking political asylum
amid the hulks of downtown
Philly dream palaces,
now abandoned, built over,
among houselights forever quenched,
in dissipated shadow.
Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Sussman was hooked by New Wave cinema, the innovative, iconoclastic, experimental films of the late 1950s and 1960s. His screen memories, eight impressionistic episodes, involve films by Ingmar Bergman (Persona), Federico Fellini (81/2) and Akira Kurosawa (Roshomon). There are also the French New Wave directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Masculin/Feminin among them), Michelangelo Antonioni (his famous trilogy including La Notte, and his ultra-hip Blow-Up), Alain Resnais (Marienbad, Hiroshima mon Amour, etc.), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), and Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey). He concludes with some reflections and references to Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books). These are, as he says in his Introduction, the “most compelling of my lifetime knockout films.” Berman and Antonioni, by the way, both died the same day, July 30, 2007 – as Sussman notes in “Screen Memory # 2 Ingmar Bergman” (“within one week of losing, in a single / diurnal throw of the die— / Berman & Antonioni!”)
On the page, the poems – or really, one long poem separated into ten sections and a prologue – alternate from left-justified to centered to right-justified, as if Sussman is engaged in a dialogue with himself. Smack in the middle of the page near the beginning of “Screen Memory #3 Federico Fellini” we read:
The landscape of my dreams –
matrix of filmhouses dotting downtown Philly,
its precocious 18th-c. downtown grid,
beloved haunts in the time of emergence:
I.H. Goldberg’s, H&H, Bain’s Deli, Swiss Pastry
standing close by. My petty dramas—
school & family—completely alien
to the maestro’s screen circus…
Thus we see Sussman on the brink of his aesthetic discovery, in his youth, that “time of emergence”. He’s sixteen when 81/2 comes out. Sussman mentions “Guido’s tug on me,” alluding to the character Marcello Mastroianni plays in the movie, Guido Anselmi, a film director who goes to a luxurious spa when his current project collapses around him (“Proud owner of a screenplay with zero plot, / even less of a future”).
It’s in “Screen Memory # 5 François Truffaut/Jean-Luc Godard” that we hear Sussman’s rhapsodic praise of the French New Wave – Nouvelle Vague:
Never once do these directors
(Rohmer & Rivette prominent among them)
sell out on beauty.
Spliced together these films—
lost, enchanting afternoons, twilights,
seizing aesthetic lifelines, escape
hatches from mechanical & digital fate,
only too foreseeable, even in their day—
conducting us into lush bowers
& byways of possibility, fascination,
enchantment!
Sussman’s impressionistic rendition of Antonioni’s Blow-Up –that post-modern film starring Vanessa Redgrave, set in the mod London of the swinging early 1960s – is both triumphant and sad, spliced with the reality of his mother’s cancer in contemporary Philadelphia.
Momentary escapes, death watch,
poor, much too suffering mother,
lured by these flicks, serial invasions,
Center City’s gaping cine-caves,
holding environments:
very first Imaginary
I could call
my own.
Who hasn’t found the solace of escape, at a matinee, alone in a downtown theater, just you and the big screen?
Sussman’s take on Kurosawa’s Rashomon is an experience we’ve all shared, those of us who have seen the film:
We poor raga
muffins bereft in suspended dissonance & conflict,
between conflicting shards of storytelling.
No shit! But Sussman then goes on to tease out the film over the next four pages of verse, only to conclude:
“I just don’t understand.
I’ve never heard such a strange story.”
Interestingly, those are the very two lines – likewise right-justified – with which Henry Sussman concludes the entire poem, the last two lines of “Screen Memory #10 November 4, 2008.”
“Screen Memory #8 Orson Welles” is curious since the film “Citizen Kane” was released in 1941, years before Sussman was born, but obviously it’s important to him. There are many words in ALL CAPS in this portion, including UNIMAGINABLE TECHNOLOGICAL IMPROV and MEDIA POWER and ANNIHILATION, DAUNTING, NOTHING, REGIME, and centered in the text:
ALLEGORY of MEDIA POWER, GLOBALIZATION
Sounds like a very contemporary concern in the age of social media and the consolidation of media outlets, doesn’t it? Sussman pays homage to Welles’s vision:
Dear Welles we continue to revere
for the arsenal of artistic tools he invented
to wind us on our way backward
along time’s wayward umbilicus…
So what is the significance of the dates, “Screen Memory #1 March 20, 2003” and “Screen Memory # 10 November 4, 2008”? In his Introduction, Sussman characterizes the eight “Screen Memories” between the two as “intense encounters with specific directors, lifetime projects and styles of photography, dramatic direction, narrative, and montage.” All of this is true, but what of the opening and the closing? “During lulls of quiet isolation in Buffalo, NY, 2003-2008, before an oversized SONY Trinitron connected to a DVD player,” he writes in the Introduction, he re-watched all those films that were so crucial to him; thus, those five and half years represent an intensely personal “retrospective.” But the real clue comes in the Prologue:
In the name of the nameless
we brave inconvenience, the traffic,
to gawk in a blacked-out cavern brimming with strangers
at throngs of no particular provenance
or meaning. This wasn’t in the script—
high-blown drama, tripwire thrillers,
not even the taut thigh
tendered in perfection.
Those Lumières
nailed it…
Ah, the movies! They really are such a deeply personal experience! Screen Memories is both a coming-of-age story, telling of Sussman’s attraction to the medium during the period of his “emergence” as a teen in Philadelphia, and also a keen assessment of the films themselves, rendered in verse, decades later, in his maturity. As Sussman puts it himself in his Introduction, “the inherent alliance between poetics, film, and critique.” And really, how can one ever separate the seer from the seen?
Feb 12 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Henry Sussman
Poetry review – SCREEN MEMORIES: Charles Rammelkamp considers Henry Sussman’s poetic account of his lifelong love of cinema
Screen Memories
Henry Sussman
BlazeVOX [Books], 2025
$22.00, 106 pages
ISBN: 978-1609644867
Sandwiched between March 20, 2003, and November 4, 2008, Henry Sussman takes us on a decades-long ride through memories of film-watching, with cultural and personal reflections spliced in. Sussman introduces Screen Memories with the bold declaration: “What follows is a poem blurring the boundaries between cinema and literature.” And, one might add, life. That opening section, one of ten “Screen Memories”, concludes:
my screen memories,
forever seeking political asylum
amid the hulks of downtown
Philly dream palaces,
now abandoned, built over,
among houselights forever quenched,
in dissipated shadow.
Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Sussman was hooked by New Wave cinema, the innovative, iconoclastic, experimental films of the late 1950s and 1960s. His screen memories, eight impressionistic episodes, involve films by Ingmar Bergman (Persona), Federico Fellini (81/2) and Akira Kurosawa (Roshomon). There are also the French New Wave directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Masculin/Feminin among them), Michelangelo Antonioni (his famous trilogy including La Notte, and his ultra-hip Blow-Up), Alain Resnais (Marienbad, Hiroshima mon Amour, etc.), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), and Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey). He concludes with some reflections and references to Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books). These are, as he says in his Introduction, the “most compelling of my lifetime knockout films.” Berman and Antonioni, by the way, both died the same day, July 30, 2007 – as Sussman notes in “Screen Memory # 2 Ingmar Bergman” (“within one week of losing, in a single / diurnal throw of the die— / Berman & Antonioni!”)
On the page, the poems – or really, one long poem separated into ten sections and a prologue – alternate from left-justified to centered to right-justified, as if Sussman is engaged in a dialogue with himself. Smack in the middle of the page near the beginning of “Screen Memory #3 Federico Fellini” we read:
The landscape of my dreams –
matrix of filmhouses dotting downtown Philly,
its precocious 18th-c. downtown grid,
beloved haunts in the time of emergence:
I.H. Goldberg’s, H&H, Bain’s Deli, Swiss Pastry
standing close by. My petty dramas—
school & family—completely alien
to the maestro’s screen circus…
Thus we see Sussman on the brink of his aesthetic discovery, in his youth, that “time of emergence”. He’s sixteen when 81/2 comes out. Sussman mentions “Guido’s tug on me,” alluding to the character Marcello Mastroianni plays in the movie, Guido Anselmi, a film director who goes to a luxurious spa when his current project collapses around him (“Proud owner of a screenplay with zero plot, / even less of a future”).
It’s in “Screen Memory # 5 François Truffaut/Jean-Luc Godard” that we hear Sussman’s rhapsodic praise of the French New Wave – Nouvelle Vague:
Never once do these directors
(Rohmer & Rivette prominent among them)
sell out on beauty.
Spliced together these films—
lost, enchanting afternoons, twilights,
seizing aesthetic lifelines, escape
hatches from mechanical & digital fate,
only too foreseeable, even in their day—
conducting us into lush bowers
& byways of possibility, fascination,
enchantment!
Sussman’s impressionistic rendition of Antonioni’s Blow-Up –that post-modern film starring Vanessa Redgrave, set in the mod London of the swinging early 1960s – is both triumphant and sad, spliced with the reality of his mother’s cancer in contemporary Philadelphia.
Momentary escapes, death watch,
poor, much too suffering mother,
lured by these flicks, serial invasions,
Center City’s gaping cine-caves,
holding environments:
very first Imaginary
I could call
my own.
Who hasn’t found the solace of escape, at a matinee, alone in a downtown theater, just you and the big screen?
Sussman’s take on Kurosawa’s Rashomon is an experience we’ve all shared, those of us who have seen the film:
We poor raga
muffins bereft in suspended dissonance & conflict,
between conflicting shards of storytelling.
No shit! But Sussman then goes on to tease out the film over the next four pages of verse, only to conclude:
“I just don’t understand.
I’ve never heard such a strange story.”
Interestingly, those are the very two lines – likewise right-justified – with which Henry Sussman concludes the entire poem, the last two lines of “Screen Memory #10 November 4, 2008.”
“Screen Memory #8 Orson Welles” is curious since the film “Citizen Kane” was released in 1941, years before Sussman was born, but obviously it’s important to him. There are many words in ALL CAPS in this portion, including UNIMAGINABLE TECHNOLOGICAL IMPROV and MEDIA POWER and ANNIHILATION, DAUNTING, NOTHING, REGIME, and centered in the text:
ALLEGORY of MEDIA POWER, GLOBALIZATION
Sounds like a very contemporary concern in the age of social media and the consolidation of media outlets, doesn’t it? Sussman pays homage to Welles’s vision:
Dear Welles we continue to revere
for the arsenal of artistic tools he invented
to wind us on our way backward
along time’s wayward umbilicus…
So what is the significance of the dates, “Screen Memory #1 March 20, 2003” and “Screen Memory # 10 November 4, 2008”? In his Introduction, Sussman characterizes the eight “Screen Memories” between the two as “intense encounters with specific directors, lifetime projects and styles of photography, dramatic direction, narrative, and montage.” All of this is true, but what of the opening and the closing? “During lulls of quiet isolation in Buffalo, NY, 2003-2008, before an oversized SONY Trinitron connected to a DVD player,” he writes in the Introduction, he re-watched all those films that were so crucial to him; thus, those five and half years represent an intensely personal “retrospective.” But the real clue comes in the Prologue:
In the name of the nameless
we brave inconvenience, the traffic,
to gawk in a blacked-out cavern brimming with strangers
at throngs of no particular provenance
or meaning. This wasn’t in the script—
high-blown drama, tripwire thrillers,
not even the taut thigh
tendered in perfection.
Those Lumières
nailed it…
Ah, the movies! They really are such a deeply personal experience! Screen Memories is both a coming-of-age story, telling of Sussman’s attraction to the medium during the period of his “emergence” as a teen in Philadelphia, and also a keen assessment of the films themselves, rendered in verse, decades later, in his maturity. As Sussman puts it himself in his Introduction, “the inherent alliance between poetics, film, and critique.” And really, how can one ever separate the seer from the seen?