Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘—”You sit stiller” said Kokka
“if whenever you move something jangles.”‘
Ezra Pound, Canto 74As we have seen in Chapter 4, the work of both Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein shows a tension between realism as faithfulness to the truth of the world on one hand and realism as reproducing the myths of bourgeois capitalism on the other. For Vertov, facts were central in overcoming this problematic of representation, as expressed in his rejection of actors, filmscripts, created scenarios, and so on. For Eisenstein, however, the relation between the facts of world and their reproduction on the screen was in some ways more complex. He criticised Vertov and kino-eye in general for misunderstanding this relation. In ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’ (1925), Eisenstein argues that kino-eye merely reproduces the world rather reconstructing it to a particular ideological end:
Like the well-known Impressionist, Cine-Eye, sketchbook in hand (!), rushes after objects as they are without rebelliously interrupting the inevitability of the statics of the causal connection between them, without overcoming this connection through a powerful social-organisation motive but yielding to its ‘cosmic’ pressure.
(Eisenstein 2010: 63; emphasis in original)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and MagicExperiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, pp. 135 - 167Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012