September 8 , 2005
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1949; repr. 1969)
Flipping through the Soviet director's collection of essays that I found while digging through the mountains of 70s crap-lit at the local Goodwill. I think the same ten copies of The Late Great Planet Earth are there from three years ago. Even for only a quarter, who buys these books? Well, okay me, but only on occasion when there's the rare find.
Eisenstein hits on everything from Japan's simultaneous usage of various writing systems, Kabuki theater, Dickens, and yes cinema. His main early theories center around the notion of "montage" or more roughly placing two images together. Not in the surrealist mode of slapping them together the-world-is-blue-like-an-orange style, but similar, using two images together to create a reaction in the viewer. Rewatching 1925's Strike or 27's October will give you a better idea of what he means.
He praises haiku and tanka poetry as perfect examples of this method, quoting Yone Noguchi: "it is the readers who make the haiku's imperfection a perfection of art."
This leaves a lot of responsibilty on the reader. My recent perusal of current poetry journals in the local college library makes me wonder how much trust most contemporary poets have in their audience as many (a majority of?) poems seem to be following a spell-it-all-out poetics.
Flipping through the Soviet director's collection of essays that I found while digging through the mountains of 70s crap-lit at the local Goodwill. I think the same ten copies of The Late Great Planet Earth are there from three years ago. Even for only a quarter, who buys these books? Well, okay me, but only on occasion when there's the rare find.
Eisenstein hits on everything from Japan's simultaneous usage of various writing systems, Kabuki theater, Dickens, and yes cinema. His main early theories center around the notion of "montage" or more roughly placing two images together. Not in the surrealist mode of slapping them together the-world-is-blue-like-an-orange style, but similar, using two images together to create a reaction in the viewer. Rewatching 1925's Strike or 27's October will give you a better idea of what he means.
He praises haiku and tanka poetry as perfect examples of this method, quoting Yone Noguchi: "it is the readers who make the haiku's imperfection a perfection of art."
This leaves a lot of responsibilty on the reader. My recent perusal of current poetry journals in the local college library makes me wonder how much trust most contemporary poets have in their audience as many (a majority of?) poems seem to be following a spell-it-all-out poetics.
Labels: Books
posted by Mr. Horton at 9:47 PM
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