Image: Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan. Courtesy of Syracuse University Library.
Can poetry and movies talk about one another? Rebecca Morgan Frank starts off LARB’s new series of essays on poetry and film, But What About the Soul: Poets at the Movies:
An airheaded female character reads Bishop by someone’s bedside. A man reads Whitman to his lifelong love at both the beginning and the end of their epic love story. None of this deepens the characters or makes terrible movies better. And must they bring in poor Tennyson at the end of a James Bond movie? Does Hollywood really think it can give itself weight by dropping in the work of poets?
Covered in a layer of grease and ink, the machine looks like something out of a Jules Verne novel. It runs about the length of a dining room table and rises to shoulder height. Individual pieces shudder and click: blackened teeth ticking over gears; arms grabbing pieces of paper and burying them in the bowels; chutes spitting them back into neat, collated piles. A plaque, suspended atop an iron bar like an antenna, reads ORIGINAL HEIDELBERG. The letters might once have been gold, or at least burnished, but are now greased black. Mr. Chan says the machine is between 55 and 60 years old.
Image: Detail from “Rate of Movement” by Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar, 1963.
259 plays
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (WIlliam Butler Yeats)
Daniel Okulitch The New American Art Songs
Daniel Okulitch singing “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” by William Butler Yeats. Music by Glen Roven.
Cairo, the 1960s. An unnamed man is released from prison where he has been held for unspecified political crimes. The moment calls for celebration or gratitude, but the man is unmoved: “I searched myself for some feeling that was out of the ordinary, some joy or delight or excitement, but found nothing.” He moves in with his sister and her fiancé and passes the days in a funk of cigarettes, masturbation, and writer’s block. Each experience is equivalent and passionless. He discovers that Cairo has changed little during his absence: the metro is still crowded, meat is still scarce, blasé catastrophe is still the city’s backbone. Cops are still less than scrupulous — a few piastres make home curfew check-ins almost pleasant. Still there are friends to call on and women to seduce, a whole drifting circuit of ghosts. One day bleeds into the next until it’s just possible to feel alive.
How much of SF is fiction? Susan Napier tells us about the relationship between science fiction and social change in Anindita Banerjee’s We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity:
We Modern People uses a breathtaking variety of sources, including everything from political pamphlets to portraits of Lenin, scientific and philosophical treatises, cinema, popular journals, and political pronouncements to expand not only the concept of science fiction itself but also its role in the evolution of modern social and political thought. Banerjee’s selection of fascinating novels, poetry, film, and art combines with her discussion of some of the scientific work and political thought going on in that period. This approach effectively illuminates her provocative main theme: that Russian science fiction of this period was in many ways not only richer and more exciting than its contemporary Western equivalents but also dynamically linked with the formation of modern Russian consciousness in general.
Image 1: The screening of a Sino-Japanese War film in a village outside of Chengdu, Sichuan Province by a government projection team. During the past decade, the central government has initiated a new project that promises to deliver one film to each village in each month. © Tong Lam
Image 2: A commercial drive-in theater in Beijing showing Star Trek into Darkness (2013). This theater alone has four screens with showings every day until after midnight. © Tong Lam
Outdoor Film Screenings
by Tong Lam
In China, there is a long history of intellectuals and the government bringing literature and films to rural areas as part of nation-building projects. In the early 1950s, for example, right as the Communist government was consolidating its power, the party sent thousands of trained projectionists into the country to deliver entertainment as well as propaganda to China’s vast rural populace. In those days, villagers greeted projection teams with excitement, and outdoor screenings were among the most anticipated cultural events for them. In recent decades, rural film projections have dwindled drastically as a result of changing social and economic conditions, as well as the popularization of televisions, satellite discs, VCDs, DVDs, and the Internet. The government has begun, however, to reactivate the program of rural film projections in the past decade. It even guarantees now that there will be at least one screening in each village in each month.
Currently, there are more than 40,000 projection teams nationwide, delivering domestic films to almost all villages. This extensive use of films for cultural engineering is not something found at present in other places, but the contemporary rural screenings do not occupy the same prominent role in village life that their precursors did in the Mao era. Not only are audiences significantly smaller now, they also tend to be made up of old people and children, since so many young and middle-aged villagers are off in cities working on construction sites, in factories, or in service jobs.
Meanwhile, in addition to government-sponsored screenings, there are also outdoor film shows sponsored by corporations, construction companies, and NGOs for purposes of branding and marketing, increasing migrant workers’ morale, and community building. While films for migrant workers are generally similar to those screened in villages, corporations and NGOs are more willing to show movies that could appeal to the urban middle class.
The starkest contrast to government sanctioned outdoor screenings is provided by the new drive-in theaters that have sprung up in China. Catering to a niche market, there are now nearly a dozen of these commercial drive-ins. Here, the self-selected middle-class moviegoers can enjoy the latest domestic and international releases inside their private cars in suburban parking lots that look as though they could exist virtually anywhere in the world.
Nicholas Rombes on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the process of creation:
Perhaps most art, at some fundamental level, is about the process of its own creation, if for no other reason than that it bears the indelible claw marks of the hands that made it. Walden, for instance, is not just about Thoreau’s experiences in nature, but also about the assembling of those experiences into the book itself. And Virginia Woolf’s experiments in her novels with extended interior monologue suggest that, maybe, that’s what her novels are really about: their composition through a particular mode of consciousness. While there are no lack of theories about what Upstream Color is about or what it all means, the fact that most of these readings don’t cancel each other out, but rather exist simultaneously, is suggestive of the particular power of this film.
