Final Paper Assignment
Due Monday, May 12 by midnight: E-mail to [email protected]
30% of Final Grade
10-12 pages
Please remember that two things are required of your Final Essay:
1. A topic that is interesting and significant from the perspectives of both Literature and Film
2. An engagement with the claims of at least one of our Critical Readings from any part of the semester
Suggested Quotes for Building Essays Around
These are quotes that I have drawn out of our critical readings this semester that I think would work well as the basis for complex and interesting essays. It is by no means an exhaustive list: you should feel free to look through the critical readings from across the semester to find one that speaks to what you are interested in specifically. I will also keep adding to this list over the next week or so.
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Structure of the Film”
At once the question arises: with what methods and means must the filmically portrayed fact be handled so that it simultaneously shows not only what the fact is, and the character’s attitude towards it, but also how the author relates to it, and how the author wishes the spectator to receive, sense, and react to the portrayed fact (151).
David Bordwell, “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film”
It is clear that the theory of montage, viewed most abstractly, can be applied outside film. The fundamental principles—assemblage of heterogeneous parts, juxtaposition of fragments, the demand for the audience to make conceptual connections, in all a radically new relation among parts and whole—seem transferable to drama, literature, music, painting and sculpture (10).
David Chinitz, “T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide”
The high value [T.S.] Eliot places on participation [in his affection for music hall and vaudeville] also explains his distrust of such new mass media as phonograph recordings and film, which in his view are absorbed passively and noncommunally. The cinema in particular represents a threat to the cultural alliance he is trying to form (239).
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity (37).
Andre Breton on "pure psychic automatism" (automatic writing) in The First Surrealist Manifesto
It was with this in mind that Philippe Soupault (with whom I had shared these first conclusions) and I undertook to cover some paper with writing, with a laudable contempt for what might result in terms of literature. The ease of realization did the rest. At the end of the first day we were able to read to each other around fifty pages obtained by this method, and began to compare our results. Altogether, those of Soupault and my own presented a remarkable similarity, even including the same faults in construction: in both cases there was the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we would never have been capable of achieving in ordinary writing, a very vivid graphic quality, and here and there an acutely comic passage.
...
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
James Lastra, "Bunuel, Bataille, and Buster, or, the surrealist life of things"
Through slapstick, [Buster] Keaton found a way to structure entire narratives around de-centred objects rather than around subjects, as well as a way to acknowledge the cinema’s photogenic transformation of the world
into an animistic realm where the self becomes a thing among things. In Keaton, conventional psychological plots are beside the point. No one ever doubts that Buster will get the girl, just as no one expects him to undergo great psychic upheaval. All the same, no one can predict what Buster will make of oil, water, soap, a car and some tyres, except that it
will follow logically from their thingness (25).
Maya Deren, “Magic is New”
What particularly excited me about film was its magic ability to make even the most imaginative concept seem real. For if the tree in the scene was real and true, the event which one caused to occur beneath it seemed also real and true. And so one could create new realities which, being rendered visible, could stand up to the challenge of “Show me!” We are moved by what we see, according to how we see it. And the film maker, by controlling what the audience sees, is also, therefore, in control of what the audience feels. The creative effort should be directed not at making a thing look like itself, but at using the capacity of the camera to make it look like what the audience should feel about it. Here was a medium which, instead of being bound by the astronomy of clocks and calendars, could make manifest the astronomy of the heart and mind—that which knows an evening as endless, and the walk back always being shorter than the first walk there. Here was a medium which could project in real terms those inner realities by which people truly live (228).
Virginia Woolf, “The Movies and Reality”
We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The King will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation—this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not. Further, all of this happened ten years ago, we are told. We are observing a world which has gone beneath the waves. Brides are emerging from the Abbey—they are now mothers; ushers are ardent—they are now silent; mothers are tearful; guests are joyful; this has been won and that has been lost, and it is over and done with. The War sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance, but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end (231).
More to come...and by the way, you may also consider the Critical Readings from the first part of the semester (on Film Noir, Western, etc).
Due Monday, May 12 by midnight: E-mail to [email protected]
30% of Final Grade
10-12 pages
Please remember that two things are required of your Final Essay:
1. A topic that is interesting and significant from the perspectives of both Literature and Film
2. An engagement with the claims of at least one of our Critical Readings from any part of the semester
Suggested Quotes for Building Essays Around
These are quotes that I have drawn out of our critical readings this semester that I think would work well as the basis for complex and interesting essays. It is by no means an exhaustive list: you should feel free to look through the critical readings from across the semester to find one that speaks to what you are interested in specifically. I will also keep adding to this list over the next week or so.
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Structure of the Film”
At once the question arises: with what methods and means must the filmically portrayed fact be handled so that it simultaneously shows not only what the fact is, and the character’s attitude towards it, but also how the author relates to it, and how the author wishes the spectator to receive, sense, and react to the portrayed fact (151).
David Bordwell, “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film”
It is clear that the theory of montage, viewed most abstractly, can be applied outside film. The fundamental principles—assemblage of heterogeneous parts, juxtaposition of fragments, the demand for the audience to make conceptual connections, in all a radically new relation among parts and whole—seem transferable to drama, literature, music, painting and sculpture (10).
David Chinitz, “T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide”
The high value [T.S.] Eliot places on participation [in his affection for music hall and vaudeville] also explains his distrust of such new mass media as phonograph recordings and film, which in his view are absorbed passively and noncommunally. The cinema in particular represents a threat to the cultural alliance he is trying to form (239).
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity (37).
Andre Breton on "pure psychic automatism" (automatic writing) in The First Surrealist Manifesto
It was with this in mind that Philippe Soupault (with whom I had shared these first conclusions) and I undertook to cover some paper with writing, with a laudable contempt for what might result in terms of literature. The ease of realization did the rest. At the end of the first day we were able to read to each other around fifty pages obtained by this method, and began to compare our results. Altogether, those of Soupault and my own presented a remarkable similarity, even including the same faults in construction: in both cases there was the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we would never have been capable of achieving in ordinary writing, a very vivid graphic quality, and here and there an acutely comic passage.
...
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
James Lastra, "Bunuel, Bataille, and Buster, or, the surrealist life of things"
Through slapstick, [Buster] Keaton found a way to structure entire narratives around de-centred objects rather than around subjects, as well as a way to acknowledge the cinema’s photogenic transformation of the world
into an animistic realm where the self becomes a thing among things. In Keaton, conventional psychological plots are beside the point. No one ever doubts that Buster will get the girl, just as no one expects him to undergo great psychic upheaval. All the same, no one can predict what Buster will make of oil, water, soap, a car and some tyres, except that it
will follow logically from their thingness (25).
Maya Deren, “Magic is New”
What particularly excited me about film was its magic ability to make even the most imaginative concept seem real. For if the tree in the scene was real and true, the event which one caused to occur beneath it seemed also real and true. And so one could create new realities which, being rendered visible, could stand up to the challenge of “Show me!” We are moved by what we see, according to how we see it. And the film maker, by controlling what the audience sees, is also, therefore, in control of what the audience feels. The creative effort should be directed not at making a thing look like itself, but at using the capacity of the camera to make it look like what the audience should feel about it. Here was a medium which, instead of being bound by the astronomy of clocks and calendars, could make manifest the astronomy of the heart and mind—that which knows an evening as endless, and the walk back always being shorter than the first walk there. Here was a medium which could project in real terms those inner realities by which people truly live (228).
Virginia Woolf, “The Movies and Reality”
We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The King will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation—this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not. Further, all of this happened ten years ago, we are told. We are observing a world which has gone beneath the waves. Brides are emerging from the Abbey—they are now mothers; ushers are ardent—they are now silent; mothers are tearful; guests are joyful; this has been won and that has been lost, and it is over and done with. The War sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance, but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end (231).
More to come...and by the way, you may also consider the Critical Readings from the first part of the semester (on Film Noir, Western, etc).