SERGEI EISENSTEIN, HOLLYWOOD AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ “PLASTIC THEATRE”

2014 ◽  
pp. 89-109
Keyword(s):  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

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.

James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett's Film

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Weiss
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
The Past

Samuel Beckett's Film has been the focus of several articles in the past decade. While current investigations of Beckett's film are diverse, what most of them share is their dependence on biographical data to support their readings. Many scholars who have written on Beckett's failed cinematic excursion, for example, point to Beckett's letter of 1936 to Sergei Eisenstein. However, the link between Beckett's interest in film and his admiration for James Joyce has sadly been overlooked. Both Irish writers saw the artistic possibilities in film and both admired the Russian silent film legend, Sergei Eisenstein. Although there is no record of Joyce and Beckett discussing cinema or of Beckett knowing about Joyce's meeting with Eisenstein in 1929, it seems unlikely that Beckett would not have known something about these meetings or Joyce's much earlier film enterprise, the Volta. By re-examining Film and speculating on the possible three way connections between Eisenstein, Joyce and Beckett, I wish to add a footnote to Beckett studies which hopefully will lead others to wander on the Beckett-Joyce-Eisenstein trail and which will open up further discussions of Film. Beckett's film is haunted by the memory of his friendship with James Joyce and his admiration for Eisenstein's talent, both of which are visible in the screen images and theme of Film.

Becoming Present, Becoming Absent: Movement and Visual Form in the Film Adaptation of Comédie

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
David Foster
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Basic Framework ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Local Movement

This article examines the use of movement and visual form in the film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Comédie (Marin Karmitz, 1966). The article broaches the kinetic elements of the work through addressing the manner in which the diegetic motion of the film can be seen to reflect extra-diegetic cinematic processes. The sense of movement that is created through Comédie's montage is then considered at length, making use of work on this theme by two quite different (though tangentially related) theorists: Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-François Lyotard. The article then charts the film's different manifestations of formal movement, and a basic framework is proposed to explain the manner in which the film creates moments of intensity, through what is termed the ‘local movement’ of the montage, and the manner in which the film manifests an overall curve of intensity, through what is termed the montage's ‘global movement’. It is argued that each form of montagic motion is reflected in the other, and that ultimately these movements might be seen to dramatise a human drive towards, and a concomitant flight from, an impossible state of ontological totality.

Modern Thought and the Phenomenology of Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Film Viewing

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.

Early Theories of the Sound Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Buhler
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Transition To Sound ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 2 examines several major theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the definition of the sound film was contested. The theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to 1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage. The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 505-526
Author(s):  
Eileen J. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
American Drama ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Rachel Crothers ◽  
Susan Glaspell

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

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