The General Line : Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov
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Eisenstein’s The General Line [1929] is a series of intellectual montages consisting of stills which is more like a creative docufiction than feature narrative film. I think this one is a clean film following the principles and practices of Russian formalism in film.
Collage 1: Eisenstein
had an incredible artistic senses and skills to create a brief graphic
narrative just by sequencing motion profiles and stills images.
Collage 2: Melting candles, slavering cattle, waving flags and weeping devotees composed one of the intellectual montages in the film.
Collage 3: The rebellious woman formed a cooperative to earn
money and there was a conflict raised over profit distribution and followed a greedy
and violent consequences. This is a prototype of collective operation.
Collage 4:The woman in the slumber land dreaming of a herd of bovines at the beach and a god-like bovine appeared in the sky and poured milk on earth, this one so Dadaistic in nature. But it shifted immediately to the modern mechanic production system that reflects the industrialization in modern Russia. Could anyone other than Eisenstein [ as well Charlie] think of this montage to tell the story in the silent era?
Collage 5: The bare feet and the feet on
shoes are the elegant motifs in this sequence. More like the difference between
those have and those have not; more like the constant distance between the old
and the new.
Collage 6: This sequence consists of some pulsating myths that highlight the woman’s free fall and the balloon’s free flight and the cow’s appearance and the woman’s rising up with a mouthful of smile make a very measured and nerve tightening brief narrative- the style only Eisenstein have mastered in.
When I have started searching archival data and literary & artistic data on the Great Bengal famine to write a novel on pre-independence age, Japanese invasion of Burma [present Myanmar], American military base on Calcutta [present Kolkata], the Bengal famine, communal riot and partition in a greater scale back in 2018. I did not find much in Bengali initially significant except sketches of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Zoynul Abedin; in 2021 I came to know that Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket [1973] is based on Bengal Famine which was adapted from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s eponymous novel [1959]. I read this novel in 2023. Chittaprosad, ‘’Life behind the Front Lines’’, page from People’s War, 24 September, 1944; Source: P.C Joshi Collections, Dr. B.R Ambedkar Central Library, JNU, Delhi Source: https://indigenousweb.com/blog/chittaprosad-bhattacharya-political-art/ Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’ Dharti Ke Lal [1946] shares some common features and outline of the narrative loosely both Me...
Two things that had made Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus [1928] very inimitable and grand. First the narrative style and second keeping the film silent in the advent of talkies. Another aspect that is very unusual and still mysterious to me as I have not finished my reading of Chaplin’s Autobiography. It is infamous that The Circus is the only Chaplin’s film which he didn’t mention in his autobiography. It should be researched well resourcefully whether it is that he went through the great turmoil in his private life during its production or it is that he faced an adversary in the professional settings and took the most risky decision not to go with the flow to uphold the aesthetic excellence and integrity of cinema. All the erstwhile feature films he followed the identical formula for dramatic structure of love triangle. In The Kid [1921], the woman was abandoned by the artist, Millet shot himself after being refused by Marie in The Woman of Paris [1923] and in his third fea...
2020 is a very strange time, probably, in this passing century, people from all over the world have been in a long solitude with anxiety from the beginning. On the event of the announcement of Booker prize long list on 28 th July, at midnight in London but in the very early morning in Dhaka, readers from around the world have got startled either before going to sleep or after getting up from the dreams when they have seen “The Booker Dozen” or the list of 13 finest fictions in English from October, 2019 to September, 2020 published in the UK/Ireland. Though it has already made a buzz that US eligibility has pushed the prize from English atmosphere to American milieu, this is the most surprising and versatile long list in the Booker history that more than half (8/13) of them are first appearance in the world of long-fiction, pages started from 192 ( Redhead by the Side of the Road ) to 912 ( The Mirror & the Light ), two of them are completing their decades-long trilogy, two of...
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