******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(Jairus Banaji on FB.)
It’s well known that Eisenstein planned to dedicate his (never made)
film on Marx’s Capital to James Joyce. He was, it has been claimed, in
awe of Joyce. In his “Notes for a film of Capital” written in 1928, the
entry for 8 April states, “The formal side is dedicated to Joyce”. He
had read Ulysses that year and was deeply impressed. Since it’s
Bloomsday, here are three interesting extracts, the last of which shows
that the Russian filmmaker was willing to stake his reputation defending
Joyce against the emerging Stalinist backlash against modernism.
Warner Brothers considered turning Ulysses into a film and asked Joyce
about the rights. Joyce dismissed the idea, claiming that it would be
impossible to film Ulysses in any adequate way. But he did take up
discussions elsewhere, with Sergei Eisenstein, thereby reciprocating the
interest that Eisenstein had shown in him while working on a film
treatment of Capital. The two men met for discussions in Paris in 1930.
They listened to Joyce’s recording of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from
Finnegans Wake and watched sequences from Battleship Potemkin and
October that tried to develop “inner film-monologue”. An almost blind
Joyce flailed around with his arms as he struggled to find Eisenstein’s
coat upon his departure. According to Hans Richter, Eisenstein described
the visit to Joyce’s house as a ‘ghost experience’. They met in a room
so dark, it seemed as if two shadows conversed.
Esther Leslie, “Eisenstein-Joyce-Marx” (this is available online).
Dziga Vertov’s work is actually closer to the aesthetic practices of
Joyce because his montage is freer and more open than Eisenstein’s. In
part, this is because Vertov’s individualist anarchist tendencies, like
Joyce’s, are opposed to Eisenstein’s more orthodox Marxist ones, which
demand a synthetic reunification of montage’s fragmentation on a higher
plane. Vertov’s theory and practice of the “kino-eye,” in fact, has many
parallels with Joyce’s Ulysses, not least their common basis in an
antirealist paradigm.
Sheehan, “Montage Joyce” https://www.jstor.org/stable/25570959?seq=1
(The photo next to Joyce is of Vertov.)
(Vertov’s openness is clear from this: After spending close to five
months at the Moscow Film Committee as a cameraman, he had to answer an
official questionnaire in December 1918. This asked all employees, “What
party do you belong to, or, are you affiliated with any party?”, to
which he replied: “I am not committed to any party, but I sympathize
with the anarchist-individualists [anarkhisti-individualisti].”).
From 1928 onwards, Eisenstein wrote and spoke about the filmic quality
of Joyce’s novel. He was a great admirer of Joyce and remained loyal to
Joyce even after Joyce’s work was denounced in Russia…Five years after
the Joyce–Eisenstein meeting (in 1930), Eisenstein would give a series
of lectures in Moscow in defense of Ulysses. There was a great deal of
opposition to Joyce’s masterpiece being translated into Russian. Only a
few chapters were published in Russian before the Congress of Soviet
Writers, and in particular the critic D. S. Mirsky declared the novel a
‘parasitical putrefaction of Western bourgeois culture’.
Katherine Weiss, “James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26471184?seq=1
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
