Eisenstein commented on Disney: “Walt Disney’s work is the most omni-appealing I’ve ever met. (…) The very idea, if you will, of an animated cartoon [animation: literally, a drawing brought to life] is practically a direct manifestation of the method of animism. In this way, what Disney does is connected with one of the deepest features of the early human psyche.” His essay on Walt Disney was part of his unfinished book METHOD, a study of the relationship between archaic thought and art practice. Disney becomes the central subject of analysis, because in his work the synesthetic affects of sound and color, and the perfect visual rhythm unite with animism, totemism and the plasmatic qualities of form. Eisenstein discovered in these distinctive characteristics of form a long genealogical ancestry and a deep yearning for the freedom that could allow one to imagine and even represent differently the relations of man and nature. “The rejection of the constraint of form, fixed once and for all, freedom from ossification, an ability to take on any form dynamically. An ability which I would call ‘plasmaticity,’ for here a being, represented in a drawing, a being of a given form, a being that has achieved a particular appearance, behaves itself like primordial protoplasm, not yet having a stable form, but capable of taking on any and all forms of animal life on the ladder of evolution.” The text exists on the border of collage, between a workbook and an intimate diary with the autobiographical, therapeutic passages on relationships to women and men, animals and plants on the sexualized relationship to reading and writing: “As usual. As soon as I read something new, breathless with delight, when it turns out that it fits perfectly somewhere into my research material. It’s understandable. The things that are thrilling for me tend to be of a particular nature. And they are also the ones that interest me from a research perspective. It’s pleasant, however, that this kind of stuff usually comes to me “par l’amour” [through love]. That gives it a certain suavity, vigor, emphasis instead of academic dryness. Something youthful, not to say boyish!“ Circus, ornament, cave paintings and Leonardo, Wilhelm Busch, Utagawa Toyohiro, Grandville, Saul Steinberg, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Napoleon, Gorki, La Fontaine, Lautréamont, Hegel, Darwin, Freud und Ferensci, Fourier and Disney. Hardly anyone had heretofore attempted to place the work of the creator of Mickey Mouse within such an opulent context of high culture.

Disney: Edited by Oksana Bulgakowa & Dietmar Hochmuth

Politics & Social Sciences

Bulgakowa, Oksana

Eisenstein/Sergei

Philosophy

PotemkinPress

<p>What did Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935), the proponent of pure abstraction in painting, have to do with film, that mechanical repository of everything that is banal and worthless? It was only in 1924 that Malevich described film as a system that fixed reality beyond the cultural idea. Nonetheless between 1925 and 1929 he wrote several articles on film as well as a script. The texts by the man who created the 'black square' that are assembled in this volume, and are for the most part translated into German for the first time, lead us to the heart of the debate about movement and acceleration as central metaphors for modernity in the international avant-garde. His contradictory reflections on the new medium document the friction between the metaphysical programme of Suprematist abstraction and the mediatic attributes of film. Malevich arranges the melodramas of Mary Pickford, the comedies of Monty Banks, the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Walter Ruttmann and Yakov Protazanov within his historical model of the rise of Modernism from Cezanne through Cubism and Futurism, to Suprematism. In this process almost all his essays deal with the 'missed encounter' between film and art, because Malevich perceives film as the perfected form, not of Naturalism but of the principles of the new painting - dynamism and abstraction. For more information, please visit the publisher's website at www.PotemkinPress.com.</p>

The White Rectangle: Writings on Film (English, Russian and Russian Edition)

Humor & Entertainment

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich

Movies

Sergei Eisenstein. a Biography

<p>Sergei Eisenstein was born in Riga in 1898. His father was a Jew of German origin who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy and who passed himself off as a Baltic baron. His mother was the daughter of wealthy Russian (and traditionally anti-Semitic) merchants from St.Petersburg. Eisenstein's life was full of unforeseen diversions and turns of events. Would he become an architect like his father and go into German exile in 1918? Would he be banished as a Freemason in 1925, or stay in the USA in 1932? Would he be sentenced by a special court in 1939 to be executed, like his friends Isaak Babel and Vsevolod Meyerhold? Or would he ultimately die as a Stalin Prize winner (for "Ivan the Terrible", Part I) of a heart attack caused by the ban on Part II? This biography came into being after extensive research in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. The author is the first to analyze Eisenstein?s diaries and correspondence?materials that were inaccessible in the past. Eisenstein?s relations with Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Stalin, with rivals and admirers, with psychoanalysts who treated him?are no longer faded out. Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers. Oksana Bulgakowa?s study of Eisenstein?s life tries to uncover these themes in his films and drawings, between the lines of his diaries and letters, in his drafts to screenplays, projects, and research. Late in life Eisenstein viewed this research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. Oksana Bulgakowa (b. 1954) graduated from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK in 1977. In the same year she moved to Berlin/GDR and received her doctoral degree from Humboldt University in 1982. She works as an author, editor, translator, and filmmaker. Since 1998 she has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA. [For further information go to www.PotemkinPress.com]</p>

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This biography came into being after extensive research in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. The author is the first to analyze Eisenstein's diaries and correspondence' materials that were inaccessible in the past. Eisenstein's relations with Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Stalin, with rivals and admirers, with psychoanalysts who treated him are no longer faded out. Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers. Oksana Bulgakowa's study of Eisenstein's life tries to uncover these themes in his films and drawings, between the lines of his diaries and letters, in his drafts to screenplays, projects, and research. Late in life Eisenstein viewed this research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. Oksana Bulgakowa (b. 1954) graduated from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK in 1977. In the same year she moved to Berlin/GDR and received her doctoral degree from Humboldt University in 1982. She works as an author, editor, translator, and filmmaker. Since 1998 she has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA. [For further information go to www.PotemkinPress.com]  

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the PotemkinPress publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PotemkinPress

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the PotemkinPress publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Disney: Edited by Oksana Bulgakowa & Dietmar Hochmuth

The White Rectangle: Writings on Film (English, Russian and Russian Edition)

Sergei Eisenstein. a Biography

Sergei Eisenstein. a Biography