Post by Jenson71 on Jan 9, 2010 18:42:06 GMT
thebrowser.com/books/interviews/ian-christie
thebrowser.com does a really cool section with some authority over five must reads on their particular subject. Today was Russian Cinema with a film professor from Birkbeck College in London.
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thebrowser.com does a really cool section with some authority over five must reads on their particular subject. Today was Russian Cinema with a film professor from Birkbeck College in London.
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So cinema in Russia was a social occasion – like an artistic salon in which to discuss your responses to the performance?
Exactly. Not to say that that was the whole response, but the point was that there were some quite distinctive Russian features, and unlike in Britain and elsewhere, where cinema was for the ‘carriage trade’, in Russia it would seem that the middle classes and the affluent were quite attracted to it. It’s an extraordinary book on the phenomenology of the cinema experience. He uses incredibly varied sources: poets, journalists, writers of all kinds are frisked to get the little asides. He talks about a postcard Alexander Blok sent to someone, saying, ‘I set off to see you yesterday, but I got ambushed by a cinema at the end of the street’ – fantastic! Because it’s one of the greatest documents about the way that cinema caught people, and just drew them in. It’s a very Soviet-era book really, with a very wry attitude towards theory. And it takes you into the absolute difference of Russian cinema – the fact that early Russian cinema really was a different social and artistic experience. It even felt different from Western cinema, which is why the two didn’t really mix. I think it’s a wonderful book. I do regularly urge people to read it who have no interest in early Russian cinema at all, because it gives them tools to understand cinema in a way that nothing else I know
Exactly. Not to say that that was the whole response, but the point was that there were some quite distinctive Russian features, and unlike in Britain and elsewhere, where cinema was for the ‘carriage trade’, in Russia it would seem that the middle classes and the affluent were quite attracted to it. It’s an extraordinary book on the phenomenology of the cinema experience. He uses incredibly varied sources: poets, journalists, writers of all kinds are frisked to get the little asides. He talks about a postcard Alexander Blok sent to someone, saying, ‘I set off to see you yesterday, but I got ambushed by a cinema at the end of the street’ – fantastic! Because it’s one of the greatest documents about the way that cinema caught people, and just drew them in. It’s a very Soviet-era book really, with a very wry attitude towards theory. And it takes you into the absolute difference of Russian cinema – the fact that early Russian cinema really was a different social and artistic experience. It even felt different from Western cinema, which is why the two didn’t really mix. I think it’s a wonderful book. I do regularly urge people to read it who have no interest in early Russian cinema at all, because it gives them tools to understand cinema in a way that nothing else I know
