Sofia University Fall 2014

Eireene Nealand

eireene.net

Prose After Cinema: Lecture 2 The Continuous

Present

http://barrylyga.com/2009/09/writing-advice-18-cinematic-prose/

Look, when people say, “Wow, that book was just like a movie!” they aren’t saying that it was written to evoke a movie. What they’re saying is that the language was so rich, so detailed, and so immaculate that they could “see” the story with their mind’s eye. That’s not cinematic prose. That’s just good writing.

But…when you try to describe the action in such a way as to mimic a movie on the page…and in the process, more often than not, end up bleeding the scene of emotion and boring the living hell out of your reader.

Take a moment and think about this: In a movie, a director can communicate something with the slightest bit of motion. Clint Eastwood stares into the camera. Then, almost imperceptibly, his eyes narrow. We all get chills down our spines. We know what this means. We feel it and we think, “Wow! What economy! What tension!” And then we go to our keyboards and we think of a scene in our books that is similar and we type, “Bill stared at her. He narrowed his eyes.” And we think it works.

It doesn’t. …

Different views of Motion

Eadweard MuybridgeThe Horse in Motion, 1878

Early Cinema: excising motion

Velocity of an Automobile 2 (1913) by Giacomo Balla

Motion as Seen By Cubists

Les Baigneuses [The Bathers] (c. 1908) by Albert Gleizes

 

A Turn Away From Representational Realism

A Durer WindowFallen Monarchs (1886)by William Bliss Baker

Velocity of an Automobile 2 (1913) by Giacomo Balla

Cutting up Space and Time

Les Baigneuses [The Bathers] (c. 1908) by Albert Gleizes

Born in Pennsylvania – but moved to Austria when she was 3.

Considered English a second Language.

Studied with William James at Radcliffe from 1893-1897

Moved to Paris in 1903Collected art and held salons

for artists and writers

Gertrude Stein (1874 –1946)

‘When we who are gifted with sight think of a space too large to come into a single field of view, we are apt to imagine it as composite, and filled with more or less jerky stoppings and startings […] it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.

William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), II 206.

William James & Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness = interior monologue

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Stream-Of-Consciousness

Simple (wrong) version

“Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade.”

“Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, now and then, in our minds is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.”

Topologizing (Creating Spaces and times)

William James on Editing

:

If now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter [22] we shall see that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in the given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element -- 'reason' if the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical -- transfixed upon it.

The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this.

Expose ourselves to a broad band of sensations.

Get a feel for the poetic temporality and spatiality created by the moment.

Selectively control streams of sensation and topologies of reception so that they produce art.

Our Task

Gertrude Stein

Beckett: one quality at a time

Hemingway

First an object in the room – primary qualities--adding qualities

Then:http://www.divxstage.to/video/jgyjhrm6l8qo1 (82:00) how to give the feel of the moment

without sound.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH6-

hzDnuLw(17:00)

Clips to play with