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Posts Tagged ‘The Cinema’

It’s the 100th anniversary of the 1920 German expressionist film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and Virginia Woolf is mentioned in the headline of the story on The Conversation website that celebrates that fact.

Virginia Woolf screensaver on an old keyboard-style Kindle

Woolf, the article says, “marvelled at how the set design mirrored the emotions felt by the characters and the audience: ‘it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than words.'”

“The Cinema”

Woolf shared her thoughts in “The Cinema,” an article published in the July 3, 1926, issue of The Nation and Athenaeum. In it, she articulates her fascination with and fear of this newly evolving art form that at the time was strictly a black-and-white, silent medium that she believed was both parasitic and ripe with potential.

It is an art form that starts with the eyes, but the eyes are soon forced to engage the brain, she argues.

We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. … Further, all this happened ten years ago, we are told. We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves. – Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema”

 

 

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“Six Lives,” a Virginia Woolf cinepoem by Sarah Riggs, revolves around six writers, sixsix lives texts by Virginia Woolf and six seaside landscapes. I couldn’t embed the film in this post, but you can view it on the director’s website.

I first conceived of Six Lives after reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse five summers in a row, and living in New York, France, and Morocco in communities of writers, artists and translators.  Woolf ‘s essay “The Cinema” offers a critique of cinema as a potentially superficial medium, and I wanted to achieve the depth of her work, and of poetic thinking, precisely in the cinematic medium.  We gathered a cluster of six writers, in various combinations, over a period of several years, in six locations, each time with a different Woolf text in question.  What gets charted is a movement from abstract thinking and the division of the body into parts, into a poetically embodied cinema where mind and body are in synchronicity.  An opening. – Sarah Riggs, director

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