- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226734149
- eISBN:
- 9780226734163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226734163.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Though Eisenstein never lived to see any of his footage and never edited a single ...
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This chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Though Eisenstein never lived to see any of his footage and never edited a single sequence from it, this film became the most famous of the many projects that Eisenstein never fully realized. This volume is conceived as an investigation into the way Eisenstein's texts, the body of the unfinished film with all the materials surrounding it including scripts, notes and letters. It also argues that Eisenstein's modernist/avant-garde theories and practices embody the same qualities and partake of the same cultures, despite the difference in their respective receptions.Less
This chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Though Eisenstein never lived to see any of his footage and never edited a single sequence from it, this film became the most famous of the many projects that Eisenstein never fully realized. This volume is conceived as an investigation into the way Eisenstein's texts, the body of the unfinished film with all the materials surrounding it including scripts, notes and letters. It also argues that Eisenstein's modernist/avant-garde theories and practices embody the same qualities and partake of the same cultures, despite the difference in their respective receptions.
Lara Feigel
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639502
- eISBN:
- 9780748652938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639502.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter describes some of the cinematic techniques or aspects of the filmic medium itself that are seen as crucial to the 1930s cinematic text. It then moves freely between silent and sound ...
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This chapter describes some of the cinematic techniques or aspects of the filmic medium itself that are seen as crucial to the 1930s cinematic text. It then moves freely between silent and sound cinema, ranging from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sergei Eisenstein used montage to illustrate the disparity between the wealth and privileges of Russia's rulers and the poverty of ordinary men. Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt is characteristic of 1920s radical cinematic montage. In Charles Chaplin's films from the 1920s and 1930s, it is the constant movements of Chaplin's body that animate the film. Like Chaplin, Dziga Vertov uses the mechanisation of cinema to emphasise the mechanisation of the modern city. The film medium emphasises its own indexicality most overtly when it engages specifically with photography. The films that bore the index of their subjects also bore the traces of the cameraman.Less
This chapter describes some of the cinematic techniques or aspects of the filmic medium itself that are seen as crucial to the 1930s cinematic text. It then moves freely between silent and sound cinema, ranging from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sergei Eisenstein used montage to illustrate the disparity between the wealth and privileges of Russia's rulers and the poverty of ordinary men. Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt is characteristic of 1920s radical cinematic montage. In Charles Chaplin's films from the 1920s and 1930s, it is the constant movements of Chaplin's body that animate the film. Like Chaplin, Dziga Vertov uses the mechanisation of cinema to emphasise the mechanisation of the modern city. The film medium emphasises its own indexicality most overtly when it engages specifically with photography. The films that bore the index of their subjects also bore the traces of the cameraman.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199257928
- eISBN:
- 9780191594854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257928.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of ...
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This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of the ideology of the aesthetic in relation to the mass market, a topic famously addressed by Sergei Eisenstein in his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’. The chapter argues that the ‘structures of feeling’ in Dickens's art enabled it to function as a bridge between the most popular form of entertainment in his own day (stage melodrama) and the most popular form of entertainment in the age that followed (the screen). While Dickens's influence on film and the influence of nineteenth‐century stage melodrama on Dickens is well known, this chapter maintains that it is the ability of Dickens's novels to ‘sit astride’ melodramatic and realist aesthetics that is the key to their capacity to function as a bridge between stage melodrama and the new medium of the cinema. The history of Dickens on screen makes clear that aesthetic forms, especially when transported across historical periods and cultures, do not carry with them unchanging or consistent ideological baggage.Less
This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of the ideology of the aesthetic in relation to the mass market, a topic famously addressed by Sergei Eisenstein in his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’. The chapter argues that the ‘structures of feeling’ in Dickens's art enabled it to function as a bridge between the most popular form of entertainment in his own day (stage melodrama) and the most popular form of entertainment in the age that followed (the screen). While Dickens's influence on film and the influence of nineteenth‐century stage melodrama on Dickens is well known, this chapter maintains that it is the ability of Dickens's novels to ‘sit astride’ melodramatic and realist aesthetics that is the key to their capacity to function as a bridge between stage melodrama and the new medium of the cinema. The history of Dickens on screen makes clear that aesthetic forms, especially when transported across historical periods and cultures, do not carry with them unchanging or consistent ideological baggage.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226734149
- eISBN:
- 9780226734163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226734163.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter analyzes the baroque aesthetic in relation to Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. It focuses on the allegory of the skull during the Day of the Dead as central to the narrative ...
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This chapter analyzes the baroque aesthetic in relation to Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. It focuses on the allegory of the skull during the Day of the Dead as central to the narrative structure of the film. It compares Eisenstein's project with Walter Benjamin's work on the use of baroque allegory as a means to a radically dialectical construction of history.Less
This chapter analyzes the baroque aesthetic in relation to Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. It focuses on the allegory of the skull during the Day of the Dead as central to the narrative structure of the film. It compares Eisenstein's project with Walter Benjamin's work on the use of baroque allegory as a means to a radically dialectical construction of history.
Kevin M. F. Platt
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801448133
- eISBN:
- 9780801460951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801448133.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This chapter analyzes representations of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the cultural life of the 1930s and 1940s. It turns first to the case of Aleksei N. Tolstoi and his many works on ...
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This chapter analyzes representations of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the cultural life of the 1930s and 1940s. It turns first to the case of Aleksei N. Tolstoi and his many works on Peter the Great. This body of work exemplifies the extent to which even of some of the most orthodox contributions to Stalinist historical mythmaking depended on sensitivity to the ironic undertow of history's own history of use and reuse. It then examines Sergei Eisenstein's second film in his uncompleted trilogy of works on Ivan the Terrible. It reads this film not as an exercise in “Aesopean” critique via historical allegory, as it is most commonly seen, but rather as a stunning achievement in metahistorical analysis. It argues that Eisenstein's film should ultimately be seen not as a willful “send up” of Stalin in the guise of Ivan but as a higher order of subversion—a meditation on and critique of Stalinist historical practices as such.Less
This chapter analyzes representations of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the cultural life of the 1930s and 1940s. It turns first to the case of Aleksei N. Tolstoi and his many works on Peter the Great. This body of work exemplifies the extent to which even of some of the most orthodox contributions to Stalinist historical mythmaking depended on sensitivity to the ironic undertow of history's own history of use and reuse. It then examines Sergei Eisenstein's second film in his uncompleted trilogy of works on Ivan the Terrible. It reads this film not as an exercise in “Aesopean” critique via historical allegory, as it is most commonly seen, but rather as a stunning achievement in metahistorical analysis. It argues that Eisenstein's film should ultimately be seen not as a willful “send up” of Stalin in the guise of Ivan but as a higher order of subversion—a meditation on and critique of Stalinist historical practices as such.
Anthony Vidler
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190218430
- eISBN:
- 9780190218461
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190218430.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes ...
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This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes their encounter in Moscow in 1928 and their shared admiration for the French architectural historian Auguste Choisy, whose description of spatial passage through the Athenian Acropolis is a key point of reference in the accounts the filmmaker and the architect develop of the role of narrative, movement, and editing in the apprehension of space. Although Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is the manipulation of a body moving through actual space according to precise calculations of a visual sequence, the cinematic version, as staged by Corbusier and Chenal, faced the viewer with a surrogate or avatar body moving through space, but never presented the viewer with the scenes viewed by this body: an invisible, one might say ineffable merging of architecture with the image of an invisible architecture as a projection of a static viewer. Architecture in this sense achieves the status desired of the modernist machine universe, but in the process has been reduced to two dimensions, without perspective. Eisenstein, for his part, was in this sense able to “build” an architecture in film—not the imperfect static forms that one had to walk through or work hard to imagine their ecstatic movement, but through the moving image itself understood as the highest technological achievement of modernism, thus achieving the (ecstatic) dissolution, in image, of modernist architecture.Less
This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes their encounter in Moscow in 1928 and their shared admiration for the French architectural historian Auguste Choisy, whose description of spatial passage through the Athenian Acropolis is a key point of reference in the accounts the filmmaker and the architect develop of the role of narrative, movement, and editing in the apprehension of space. Although Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is the manipulation of a body moving through actual space according to precise calculations of a visual sequence, the cinematic version, as staged by Corbusier and Chenal, faced the viewer with a surrogate or avatar body moving through space, but never presented the viewer with the scenes viewed by this body: an invisible, one might say ineffable merging of architecture with the image of an invisible architecture as a projection of a static viewer. Architecture in this sense achieves the status desired of the modernist machine universe, but in the process has been reduced to two dimensions, without perspective. Eisenstein, for his part, was in this sense able to “build” an architecture in film—not the imperfect static forms that one had to walk through or work hard to imagine their ecstatic movement, but through the moving image itself understood as the highest technological achievement of modernism, thus achieving the (ecstatic) dissolution, in image, of modernist architecture.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312120
- eISBN:
- 9781846315190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315190.009
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but ...
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This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but rejected by Paramount. It also describes Eisenstein's project with Upton Sinclair to make the film Que Viva Mexico!, which resulted in a shorter film released under the title Thunder Over Mexico in 1933.Less
This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but rejected by Paramount. It also describes Eisenstein's project with Upton Sinclair to make the film Que Viva Mexico!, which resulted in a shorter film released under the title Thunder Over Mexico in 1933.
Paisley Livingston
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199570171
- eISBN:
- 9780191721540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199570171.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, General
This chapter criticizes what the chapter calls the ‘bold thesis’, which is the conjunction of the idea that films can make an original contribution to philosophy, and the idea that this contribution ...
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This chapter criticizes what the chapter calls the ‘bold thesis’, which is the conjunction of the idea that films can make an original contribution to philosophy, and the idea that this contribution can be achieved primarily or even entirely through means exclusive to the cinematic medium. A dilemma argument against this thesis is set forth: either support for the bold thesis depends on a claim about a cinematic contribution that cannot be paraphrased and so can be reasonably doubted, or it rests on a contribution that can be paraphrased, in which case the clause about medium specificity is betrayed. As an alternative to the bold thesis, the chapter advocates a moderate thesis whereby a film-related contribution to philosophy can be of value even when the philosophical content is neither original nor conveyed primarily by means exclusive to the cinematic medium. This chapter discusses Aaron Smuts' proposed solution to the problem of paraphrase, which makes reference to an argument advanced by Sergei Eisenstein in the ‘For God and Country’ sequence of October.Less
This chapter criticizes what the chapter calls the ‘bold thesis’, which is the conjunction of the idea that films can make an original contribution to philosophy, and the idea that this contribution can be achieved primarily or even entirely through means exclusive to the cinematic medium. A dilemma argument against this thesis is set forth: either support for the bold thesis depends on a claim about a cinematic contribution that cannot be paraphrased and so can be reasonably doubted, or it rests on a contribution that can be paraphrased, in which case the clause about medium specificity is betrayed. As an alternative to the bold thesis, the chapter advocates a moderate thesis whereby a film-related contribution to philosophy can be of value even when the philosophical content is neither original nor conveyed primarily by means exclusive to the cinematic medium. This chapter discusses Aaron Smuts' proposed solution to the problem of paraphrase, which makes reference to an argument advanced by Sergei Eisenstein in the ‘For God and Country’ sequence of October.
Masha Salazkina
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226734149
- eISBN:
- 9780226734163
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226734163.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult ...
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During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, this book reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein's oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, the author situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, the author explains how Eisenstein's engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein's bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, This book provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master's theories and aesthetics.Less
During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, this book reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein's oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, the author situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, the author explains how Eisenstein's engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein's bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, This book provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master's theories and aesthetics.
Leigh Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748627691
- eISBN:
- 9780748684441
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627691.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers ectoplasm in relation to the materiality of film, and ask what this materiality does to questions of mimesis. It looks at Ezra Pound's conflicted attitude to film, via both his ...
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This chapter considers ectoplasm in relation to the materiality of film, and ask what this materiality does to questions of mimesis. It looks at Ezra Pound's conflicted attitude to film, via both his critical writing and The Cantos, and compares it to the aesthetics and politics of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular in his writings on Disney. For both, the filmic and the ectoplasmic incarnate central questions of the relation between representation and the world, but to very different effect. The chapter argues that in the end the politics of each depend on the extent to which they allow representation to be ectoplasmic.Less
This chapter considers ectoplasm in relation to the materiality of film, and ask what this materiality does to questions of mimesis. It looks at Ezra Pound's conflicted attitude to film, via both his critical writing and The Cantos, and compares it to the aesthetics and politics of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular in his writings on Disney. For both, the filmic and the ectoplasmic incarnate central questions of the relation between representation and the world, but to very different effect. The chapter argues that in the end the politics of each depend on the extent to which they allow representation to be ectoplasmic.
Jesse Schotter
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474424776
- eISBN:
- 9781474445009
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern ...
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The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.
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The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.
Jeremy Matthew Glick
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479844425
- eISBN:
- 9781479814855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479844425.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter engages three Haitian revolutionary “Lines of Flight”: the late-night forest run of the title character of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a lesson given by Sergei Eisenstein to his ...
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This chapter engages three Haitian revolutionary “Lines of Flight”: the late-night forest run of the title character of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a lesson given by Sergei Eisenstein to his film students in Moscow on how to film Haitian revolutionary combatant Dessalines’s flight out a window, and Orson Welles’s radio play on the Haitian Revolution. I examine how the Haitian Revolution inspires and focuses three examples of avant-garde performance and works as a political referent to focus political and philosophical thought pertaining to slavery, revolution, and the importance of aesthetic form.Less
This chapter engages three Haitian revolutionary “Lines of Flight”: the late-night forest run of the title character of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a lesson given by Sergei Eisenstein to his film students in Moscow on how to film Haitian revolutionary combatant Dessalines’s flight out a window, and Orson Welles’s radio play on the Haitian Revolution. I examine how the Haitian Revolution inspires and focuses three examples of avant-garde performance and works as a political referent to focus political and philosophical thought pertaining to slavery, revolution, and the importance of aesthetic form.
Philip Watts, Dudley Andrew, Yves Citton, Vincent Debaene, and Sam Di Iorio
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190277543
- eISBN:
- 9780190277574
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277543.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Criticism/Theory
The first filmmaker for whom Barthes expressed a sustained enthusiasm, whose films he did not feel the need to demystify, and the first figure in film history with whom he was in sympathetic ...
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The first filmmaker for whom Barthes expressed a sustained enthusiasm, whose films he did not feel the need to demystify, and the first figure in film history with whom he was in sympathetic dialogue, was the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Two articles from the early 1970s, “The Third Meaning” and “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” confirm this enthusiasm, and attest to Barthes’ attempt, in the years after May 1968, to define a new relation to film, one in which demystification played no part and no longer served even as a pretext for writing about film. Both these essays are dedicated to friends; dedications of essays were a rare occurrence in Barthes’ writing, and they give Barthes’ essays on Eisenstein a slightly different tenor, one distinct from the scientific rationality of semiological analysis, in that they gesture to friendship, affect and “an emotion which simply designates what one loves.”Less
The first filmmaker for whom Barthes expressed a sustained enthusiasm, whose films he did not feel the need to demystify, and the first figure in film history with whom he was in sympathetic dialogue, was the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Two articles from the early 1970s, “The Third Meaning” and “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” confirm this enthusiasm, and attest to Barthes’ attempt, in the years after May 1968, to define a new relation to film, one in which demystification played no part and no longer served even as a pretext for writing about film. Both these essays are dedicated to friends; dedications of essays were a rare occurrence in Barthes’ writing, and they give Barthes’ essays on Eisenstein a slightly different tenor, one distinct from the scientific rationality of semiological analysis, in that they gesture to friendship, affect and “an emotion which simply designates what one loves.”
K. J. Donnelly
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199773497
- eISBN:
- 9780199358816
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773497.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, Western
Montage theory remains at the heart of filmmaking and film studies, although many of its original concerns and insights have perhaps receded from view. Sound montage, theorized with the arrival of ...
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Montage theory remains at the heart of filmmaking and film studies, although many of its original concerns and insights have perhaps receded from view. Sound montage, theorized with the arrival of recorded synchronized sound in films, was the first theory of sound, as well as image, and sometimes explicitly derives ideas and inspiration from music-based theory. Its most influential theorist was Sergei Eisenstein, who also tested and experimented with his ideas in feature films. Montage theory often focused on asynchrony as potentially progressive in aesthetic (and to a degree, political) terms. The crucial notion of sound/music parallel and counterpoint, while perhaps not generating a tremendously robust analytical method, has nevertheless remained an important analytical lens for filmmakers and film criticism. Using this concept, the chapter argues that there has been an unacknowledged persistence of the modes of silent and early sound film in contemporary cinema.Less
Montage theory remains at the heart of filmmaking and film studies, although many of its original concerns and insights have perhaps receded from view. Sound montage, theorized with the arrival of recorded synchronized sound in films, was the first theory of sound, as well as image, and sometimes explicitly derives ideas and inspiration from music-based theory. Its most influential theorist was Sergei Eisenstein, who also tested and experimented with his ideas in feature films. Montage theory often focused on asynchrony as potentially progressive in aesthetic (and to a degree, political) terms. The crucial notion of sound/music parallel and counterpoint, while perhaps not generating a tremendously robust analytical method, has nevertheless remained an important analytical lens for filmmakers and film criticism. Using this concept, the chapter argues that there has been an unacknowledged persistence of the modes of silent and early sound film in contemporary cinema.
James Chandler
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226034959
- eISBN:
- 9780226035000
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226035000.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just ...
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In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. This book challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. It begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, and then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, the author reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. He then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, the book casts new light on the long eighteenth century, and on the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.Less
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. This book challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. It begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, and then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, the author reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. He then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, the book casts new light on the long eighteenth century, and on the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312120
- eISBN:
- 9781846315190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315190.008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter focuses on the works of novelist John Dos Passos, who not only made sustained attempts to incorporate cinematic elements in his most famous fiction, Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. ...
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This chapter focuses on the works of novelist John Dos Passos, who not only made sustained attempts to incorporate cinematic elements in his most famous fiction, Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, but also saw film as a unique force for cultural change in the modern era. In 1928 Dos Passos visited the Soviet Union, where he met filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and discussed montage with him, a meeting that appears to have increased Dos Passos' interest in the cinema and encouraged him towards this stated goal of narrative objectivity.Less
This chapter focuses on the works of novelist John Dos Passos, who not only made sustained attempts to incorporate cinematic elements in his most famous fiction, Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, but also saw film as a unique force for cultural change in the modern era. In 1928 Dos Passos visited the Soviet Union, where he met filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and discussed montage with him, a meeting that appears to have increased Dos Passos' interest in the cinema and encouraged him towards this stated goal of narrative objectivity.
Christopher Pavsek
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231160995
- eISBN:
- 9780231530811
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231160995.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book examines the utopian pronouncements or representations in the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Kidlat Tahimik, and Alexander Kluge. In one way or another, Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge subscribe to ...
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This book examines the utopian pronouncements or representations in the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Kidlat Tahimik, and Alexander Kluge. In one way or another, Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge subscribe to an idea of utopia in which the hope for and aspiration toward the establishment of a social utopia is deeply bound up with the commitment to revealing the possibilities contained in the history of film. The most prominent filmmaker in the constructions of cinema's utopian past is Sergei Eisenstein. In his film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein stages not only the imagination of a kind of political practice, but also the imagination of committed filmmaking practice. The film is utopian not only in its commitment to the project of revolution and the constitution of a new society, but also in its status as the most modern of the arts, one suited to the task of revolution and appropriate to the modern technical age of industrialization.Less
This book examines the utopian pronouncements or representations in the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Kidlat Tahimik, and Alexander Kluge. In one way or another, Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge subscribe to an idea of utopia in which the hope for and aspiration toward the establishment of a social utopia is deeply bound up with the commitment to revealing the possibilities contained in the history of film. The most prominent filmmaker in the constructions of cinema's utopian past is Sergei Eisenstein. In his film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein stages not only the imagination of a kind of political practice, but also the imagination of committed filmmaking practice. The film is utopian not only in its commitment to the project of revolution and the constitution of a new society, but also in its status as the most modern of the arts, one suited to the task of revolution and appropriate to the modern technical age of industrialization.
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- July 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198768913
- eISBN:
- 9780191822186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of ...
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This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.Less
This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.
Christina Petersen
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037689
- eISBN:
- 9780252094941
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037689.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to ...
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This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to White fall largely along movement lines. At once the embodiment of a low-culture narrative mode and a spectacular star object who transcended any particular plot line, White's pejorative status as “the most assassinated woman in the world” may have been more revealing than Jean Epstein originally intended. Whereas Epstein decried White's constant near-death experiences and numerous last-minute escapes as unrealistic pulp fiction, surrealists celebrated her as a “marvelous” apparition. This chapter compares the reactions of adherents of surrealism and impressionism to White and considers how Desnos and the surrealists attempted to transpose the “love and poetry” of her films into their own filmmaking practice. It suggests that White's legacy aside from international stardom exerted an influence upon the avant-garde movement, and that her influence had revolutionary potential for challenging the status quo.Less
This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to White fall largely along movement lines. At once the embodiment of a low-culture narrative mode and a spectacular star object who transcended any particular plot line, White's pejorative status as “the most assassinated woman in the world” may have been more revealing than Jean Epstein originally intended. Whereas Epstein decried White's constant near-death experiences and numerous last-minute escapes as unrealistic pulp fiction, surrealists celebrated her as a “marvelous” apparition. This chapter compares the reactions of adherents of surrealism and impressionism to White and considers how Desnos and the surrealists attempted to transpose the “love and poetry” of her films into their own filmmaking practice. It suggests that White's legacy aside from international stardom exerted an influence upon the avant-garde movement, and that her influence had revolutionary potential for challenging the status quo.
Brian J. Snee
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813167473
- eISBN:
- 9780813167800
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813167473.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter utilizes the work of Sergei Eisenstein to demonstrate that John Ford’s classic film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) presents Lincoln as the quintessential Great Commoner. The film is a ...
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This chapter utilizes the work of Sergei Eisenstein to demonstrate that John Ford’s classic film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) presents Lincoln as the quintessential Great Commoner. The film is a brilliant example of mimetic structure, wherein the form of the film complements its content. In this case, the film presents its audience with an endless series of false dilemmas, which collectively support the validity of its characterization of Lincoln as simultaneously common and great.Less
This chapter utilizes the work of Sergei Eisenstein to demonstrate that John Ford’s classic film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) presents Lincoln as the quintessential Great Commoner. The film is a brilliant example of mimetic structure, wherein the form of the film complements its content. In this case, the film presents its audience with an endless series of false dilemmas, which collectively support the validity of its characterization of Lincoln as simultaneously common and great.
