Eisentein was an Einstein!

     Film.. one of the most technological forms of art. And its consequences on the modern world are by no means dimmed from its appearance occurring during the war era. The moving pictures brought countless new ways to push political and personal agendas. Basically a very effective military propaganda pusher. And that's basically what Sergei Eisenstein used to make his mark on the world, while maintaining its status as a fine art.

     His strength was defined by "combining realistic narrative with symbolic imagery." A skill invaluable to the Russian revolution. His silent film masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, didn't actually occur but he used brutalities described by the Russian press to create the effect of an on-the-spot documentary. Also known as a montage. I have to concur, that it was extremely effective.

       It's easy to spot the political swing of The Battleship Potemkin, as you see the tzarist soldiers attacking their civilian victims. And if that film, seemed bias, then his post-silent film Alexander Nevsky was undoubtedly so. So much so that it earned the approval of Joseph Stalin. It praised the Russian Prince that defended the Motherland against an onslaught of Teutonic Knights... Sound familiar anyone? Umm, surely not anything like WWI.. Also noteworthy is the Demonic reference to the German knights around three minutes into this clip.

      Slanted view or not I can't help but realize the genius of this mans work with an unpioneered technology and yet molding it into a fine art. Eisenstein developed techniques like building tension throughout the film by playing sequential shots of conflicting visual scenes, and he helped further the ability of the filmmaker to produce epic scenes. Such as the large battle seen here. His work lives on as an monument along the timeline of film, and it's uses.

Not Stale! but Fail..

        I think that Nijinsky's choreography of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, was so bad that it should have caused riots! Nijinsky was a forward thinking choreographer, and only a year before had made a daring leap in the accepted types of modern dance with his Afternoon of the Faun. The Afternoon of the Faun was very critically received and was soon put out of circulation. However it seems that Nijinsky's hope for pushing the boundary's of dance was not dimmed.

         He found many ways to push the boundary's of classic ballet or dance. He incorporated the crazy wheeling, jarring, motions with a fairly large number of dancers usually centered around something. Through the undercurrents of darkness in the music and the almost possessed movements of the dancers, one can just picture a savage group of natives preparing for some terrible sacrifice in the preparation for spring.. Some renditions even include "sacrificial dance" in their public titles. Understandably, for the people of the time period who were perhaps going to the theater for an evening of enjoyment, this was an aberration. I happen to agree with them.

      In Nijinsky's defense his frenzied leaps, pawing, stamping, and jarring motions do seem to adapt well to the raw rhythmic complexity of Stravinsky's score. However at the public's shock of viewing this, even causing riots to break out, Stravinsky abandoned the sinking ship and confessed to being disturbed by Nijinsky's strange choreography
      In summation I think that the ballet of Rite of Spring was a failure at modern dance. I realize that it did have some very new and nonconforming style but I seriously think that there comes a time when even the "shock value" of something, is taken too far and hence becomes worthless and offensive.

Remarque's Remarkable

         The humanities book claims world War I inspired some of this century's most outstanding fiction. I have to say that after reading the excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front, I believe that Remarque has created a masterpiece of mentally illustrated fiction.

        Somehow his style brings me back to the reading on Pound's Personae. It reminisces to the succession of images to evoke subtle comparisons. It's much longer, but I get the same  feeling of an emotional "shape" when I read  this and give my mind time to conjure up the feeling and vivid pictures that Remarque has endowed this passage with.


     And though it is fiction I think that it is more powerful simply because of the situation and the stark new reality that people were facing about the War that was happening around them. Basically what I mean by that is the massive increase in the efficiency of taking lives makes the descriptions come to life in everyones imagination. Especially as they considered the implications of "limitless" warfare. That, coupled with the technology of photography, brought the war psychologically to the doorstep of the entire world.

      All Quiet on the Western Front gives us a different perspective on World War I than our history books might allow. Through this novel we get to hear the thought's of a German soldier in World War I, an enemy of the United States and it's allied forces. We cannot help but sympathize with our "enemy", and consequently cannot help but ask ourselves what is an enemy? Today, wars are fought in many different ways, but we can easily imaging a young soldier like the narrator struggling with issues like identity, patriotism, and mortality.

    

The Wright Way To Build

           Democracy. The foundation of the American society. Since the beginnings of our nation we have focused on the freedom of the individual, and that this is a liberty never to be denied. However we weren't the first to come up with this concept. We adopted it from the old Western Civilization, and it has worked out very well so far. At this point you're probably wondering if I mis-titled my blog. I'm simply explaining why I'm in concordance with Frank Loyd Wright's adaptive, and ground breaking, architecture style. Even as we took the democratic ideals of the Greeks and the Romans, our architects were looking at the white columns, and pillars of the Parthenon.

             It was soon obvious that this style was the architecture of choice for our fledgling confederation. As the white columns make heavy appearances in the White House, the Lincoln memorial, almost every state capital, and many private homes.

            Frank Loyd Wright took one look at the situation and decided that adding the outstanding vertical pillars on a terrain as flat and long as the American Midwest, was just plain foolish. Wright insisted, "To use any material wrongly is to abuse the integrity of the whole design." Following that guideline it seems rather obvious that the shining white stone quarried in the mountains doesn't belong in the prairie. Instead he would go on to use lots of browns, reds, and tan, like one would see on the prairie.

         I very much enjoy his architecture, and how it seems to grow from the ground that it's built on. Very few people don't enjoy his most famous creation, which is Fallingwater. But I have even seen his private homes built right here in Peoria and though they're very old now they blend with the land where they were setting they were built in. The availability of new materials such as concrete and welded steel beams should be somewhat accredited to Frank Loyd Wright's successful new style. Before these materials, it was much more difficult to build structurally sound buildings that had low, wide sweeping overhangs and massive concrete balcony's.

Fallingwater House

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CVKU3ErrGM

         Frank Loyd Wright was the first American architect of world significance, I believe that it was this philosophy of relationship between the setting and the structure that made him as successful as he was.