Word: eisenstein
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Newness is not merely a matter of time but of attitude. Despite the legacy of such rare masters as D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, the vast majority of films a decade ago were little more than pale reflections of the the ater or the novel. The New Cinema has developed a poetry and rhythm all its own. Traditionally, says Cahiers Editor Jean-Louis Comolli, "a film was a form of amusement - a distraction. It told a story. Today, fewer and fewer films aim to distract. They have be come not a means of escape but a means of approaching...
PROKOFIEV: IVAN THE TERRIBLE (Melodiya/ Angel). Prokofiev composed this music for Sergei Eisenstein's movie Ivan the Terrible in the early 1940s, but his means (oratorio-like) and aims (monumental) hardly allow it to be described as background music. Much of it is so impressive as to provide ammunition for those who predict that the best new music will be composed expressly to serve other arts. Yet the other arts can overwhelm-as sometimes in this case, when the narrator in Ivan (theatrically intoned in lyrical Russian by Aleksander Estrin) makes the work sound to non-Russian-speaking listeners...
Satyajit Ray's The Music Room is the kind of movie that Eisenstein gloried in: history driven to allegory and given force by brilliant cinematic techniques...
...best in the lushness of the palace rooms. He has Eisenstein's passion for objects, particularly chandeliers, and for pageantry. By rapid cutting from dancer to objects to this or that on-looker he gives motion to ceremonies which I imagine would be otherwise tedious to Occidentals. In fact, it is chiefly through the visual manipulations that the movie is comprehensible to Westerners. A few scenes, shot by the walls of the palace or on its roof, recall the periods of magical quiet in the courtyard episodes in Rasho Mon, and it is at these times that the film seems...
What can a director do with such supererogatory skimble-scamble? A great director-an Eisenstein or a Fellini-would no doubt have challenged comparison with Joyce by boldly transforming his words into images. Director Strick has preserved on his sound track as many of Joyce's words as he could, but most of the time he has used the images as a lecturer uses slides: simply to illustrate what is being said. Often the illustrations are inept. Joyce was half blind, and his Dublin is a city dimly seen but fantastically imagined. Strick's Dublin, however...