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April 15, 1973 - Image 5

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Sunday, Aoril 15, 1973

THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Page Pies

Sunday, April 15, l~73 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five

I im - 1- 11*1 1 1

Frag, frisbee, funky

Dracula: Indiscreet id of the bourgeoisie

A SUPPLEMENT TO THE OX-
FORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY,
Volume 1, A-G. Oxford, at the
Clarendon Press, 1331 pages, $50.
By JAY DILLON
WE ARE accustomed to expect
only that a dictionary per-
form well-that it give cis the
most direct possible access to
what we like to think of as the
"meaning" of a word or phrase,
to its "proper pronunciation," or
to details of its provenience. A
dictionary is not to be read, or
even to be aimlessly 1 e a f e d
through. The bookish, grandilo-
quent type is kidded about "read-
ing the dictionary," or "having
swallowed the dictionary." Such
is the prevalent, utilitarian view
of dictionaries. No more atten-
tion is paid to a dictionary than
is paid to our English language.
Both are mere instruments.
This is not even properly a
dictionary of which I am writing;
it is the first volume of an even-
tual three volumes which will
bring up to date the venerable
Oxford English Dictionary, which
was originally published between
1884 and 1928. In 1933, a one-
volume supplement was publish-'
ed, to accommodate those words.
which had passed into the tongue
too late for inclusion in the origi-
nal.
1HE NEW Supplement greatly
expands the utility of the
OED. Thousands of new words,
and new senses of old words,
have established themselves in
the English tongue since 1933.
These words, or phrases, docu-
ment much of the progress, or

VENE TIA

the retrogress, of the English-
speaking world over the past fifty
years. Only the OED, as a dic-
tionary "on historical principles,"
can provide such a record. Every
entry is supplied with illustra-
tive quotations from well-bibliog-
raphed sources, including the
earliest known written appear-
ance of the word, or "first attes-
tation." The quotations are per-
haps the items in the OED which
provide the greatest delight to
the nonsecialist. Now we can
see quoted not only the Beowulf-
Poet, Langland, Snenser, Shake-
speare, Ralegh, Trollope, Dick-
ens, Jefferson, Wollstonecraft,
Melville, Kinling, and The Times,
bht also T. S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf,' Henry Miller, Ezra Pound,
Ogden Nash, Anais Nin, P. G.
Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Cole
Porter, Agatha Christie, D. H.
Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, and
The Village Voice.
As a bookseller, and one esne-
cillr interested in English lexi-
cography, I have often noticed
that many customers seem to
have the impression that the Ox-
ford dictionaries, even the OED,
are s o i e h o w dictionaries of
"British English: I want an
American dictionary." American
lHritage and Webster's even en-
co"rage this by calling some of
their products dictionaries of the
"American language." The en-
thsistic Mr. Mencken notwith-
standing, "the American ]an-
guage" is a deliberate misnomer
at best, and at worst a pernici-
ons fictin. "American English"
is a collection of dialects, just as
is "British English." The OED is
no more a dictionary of British
Enelish than it is of American
English, or of Anglo-Indian, or
of Canadian English; it is a gen-
eral dictionary of the English
language.
THE OED Supplement will be
an unequaled treasury of our
tongue as it has developed since
the original Dictionary was com-
pleted: it is not merely a monu-
mental reference work for phil-
logists. A few examples should
suffice.
The B. E. M. of science fiction
is not known to have appeared
earlier than eighteen years ago,
in Arthur Koestler's The Trail of
the Dinosaur, and Other Essays.
The bagel seems to have found
its way into our language in, or
only shortly before, 1932 - not
very long ago at all.
Baloney, in the sense of "bosh"
or "nonesense," is recorded as
having appeared in the pages o
The Saturday Evening Post in
1928.
Henry Miller, in Sexus, has the
first use of boobs (xsbreasts;
a shortening of booby, from the
much earlier-1686-b u b b y) in
1949.
Boot-leg is as old as about
1889; "passing the buck" appears
in print in 1865.
Bullshit is the title of "an ex-
cellent piece of scholarly ribal-
dry" (probably one of the King
Bolo poems) written by T. S.
Vth.
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Eliot, sent to Wyndham Lewis,
and mentioned by Lewis in a
letter to Ezra Pound in about
1915. No earlier instance of the
word is known.
And so forth: People were get-
ting upset about the linguistic ex-
cesses of commercialese in 1910;
copy-cats were so called in 1896,
dingbats in 1838; dough meant
"money" in 1851 at Yale.
Burchfield, in his Introduction
to the new Supplement, writes,
"In 1957, when we began our
work, no general English-lan-
guage dictionary contained the
more notorious of the sexual
words; 'nous avons change tout
cela,' and two ancient words,
once considered too gross and
vulgar to be given countenance
in the decent environment of
a dictionary, now appear with
frill supporting evidence along
with a wide range of colloqu-
ial and coarse expressions re-
ferring to sexual and excretory
functions.
There was, in about A.D. 1230
in London, a street named "Gro-
pecuntlane." So there. Fuck is
not known in Anglo-Saxon, or
even in Middle English: in fact,
no attestation for it has been
fomd for earlier than about
1503, in the work of the Scots
poet William Dunbar. The Sup-
plement, oddly enough, does not
comment upon the presumably
fanciful folk-etymology of fuck
as an acronym for "Fornication
Under the Consent of the King,"
ply noted that the ulterior ety-
ply noted that the ulterior sty-
mology is unknown. A variant
spelling, "f--k," is listed as hav-
ing appeared from the seven-
tenth century. Curiously enough,
N o r m a n Mailer's euphenism
"fig" is nowhere noted. Fasci-
nating. Fascinating.
iNE CAN, needless to say,
find items which are missing
from the new Suppnlemient, and
which we woUl ha,e expected
to have found there. Yet we must
note that the first section of conv
(A-aloha) for Volume 1 was
sent to press in May 1965, almost
eight years ago.
So acid for TSD does not an-
pear: nre'imably a note under
"LSD" will be found in Volume
TI. Missing also is recogniion
of the recent bastardization of
chauvinism in tie catch-phrase
"male chauvinist pig." More sur-
nrisingly, double dactvi, a verse
form invented in 1951, and for
which amnle and readily acces-
sible attestations existed well be-
fore the D's went to press, is not
mentioned in the Supplement.
Yet the defects are hard to
find; Brchfield and his staff
have produced a lexicon emmi-
nently worthy of attachment to
the OED. S e v e r a technical
and tvpographical imorovements
have been made, prime among
which is that the first letters of
head words set in bold face are
no longer uniformly set in upper-
case, regardless of their status.
+ The distinction, which I never
quite understood, between "main
words" and "subordinate words"
has been dropped.
r TE ULTIMATE difficulty is
that any dictionarv of any
"living" language will in very
short order obsolesce. The new
OED Supplement has alreadv be-
gun. It is prohibitively expensive
to revise and reset the text of the
dictionary every few years; it is
for this reason that we now have
a supplement, rather than a re-
vised OED. A series of supple-
ments, even if each were to
absorb the contents of all pre-
vious supplements, would obvi-
ously begin to cost as much as
periodic revision of the the OED
itself, to the vast and continu-
ing expense of the buyers.

The entire OED is now avail-
able in a "micrographically re-
produced" edition for $75, one
quarter of the previous price.
Volume I of the new Supplement
costs $50, and there is little
reason to expect that Volumes
11 and III will cost any less. A
very great deal of money is in-
volved, and the magnitude of the
expense will surely, and unfor-
tunately, d i s s u a d e many who
might otherwise buy the diction-
ary. Yet it is all more than
worth the money.

IN SEARCH OF DRACULA,
by Raymond McNally and Radu
Florescu. New York Graphic So-
ciety, 223 pages, $8.95.
By NIGEL GEARING
IN THE LAST year the market
seems to have been flooded
with books on Dracula, each with
its own inflection and prejudice:
Dracula as verifiable historical
figure, Dracula as anthropologi-
cal myth, Dracula as Jungian
archetype. Etc., etc.
This one takes the first of
the direttions, finding in the fif-
teenth century the original source
of numerous folktales,,the distant
ancestor of Bram Stoker's count
and the inspiration of over one
hundred movies,
Transylvania (according to le-
gend, the ghoulish Count's home-
land) is, it turns out, a real
place-for almost one thousand
years a province of Hungary and
now part of modern Romania.
Similarly, Dracula himself can
be traced back to an actual
Prince of Wallachia who reigned
sporadically from 1448 to 1476.
Known variously as Vlad Tepes
(The Impaler) and Dracula (Son
of the Devil and/or Dragon) he
is reported to have authorized
the killings of 100,000 people---ap-
proximately one fifth of his prin-
cipality's population. As his name
suggests, his favorite method of
dispatch was to skewer his vic-
tims on pikestaffs; other amus-
ing variations are recorded in
this book and make for those le-
gands which persist to this day
in the original Dracula's native
country. Authors McNally and
Florescu tirelessly adumbrate
those other factors (often philo-
logical) which account for the
connotations of vampirism etc.
that Stoker picked up on and

blended in his sensational pot-
boiler of 189~. The book is beauti-
fully mounted, has some exqui-
site photographs, and is--for my
money-a trifle tedious.
Count Dracula's current resur-
rection will certainly not be his
last. This not merely proves what
we already knew (that you can't
keep a good vampire down): it
validates the premise that the
Gothic mode proper tends to sur-
face in periods of acute social
crisis. And if I seem a bit weary
of this present trend it's for rea-
sons related to that surely self-
evident social correlation. For if
it is self-evident, why have none
of these books accounted (to my
knowledge) for The Real Truth
Behind Count Dracula? At the
risk of compounding the felony
of others, here we go on what-
till the next time-is the "defini-
tive" reading of the Dracula
myth .
BRAM STOKER'S novel is the
real inspiration behind this
present century's continued in-
terest. It appeared in a society
which, once ebullient and self-
confident, was now falling into
"the sear, the yellow leaf." (It
is, after all, the "decadent" per-
iod of Aubrey Beardsley's Yellow
Book).
Thus Dracula can now be seen
in much the same way we view
Rasputin's relation to the deca-
dent, inbred court of Nicholas
and Alexandra: Stoker's crea-
tion was to the Victorian bour-
geois both the masochistic sym-
bol of his own destruction and,
somewhere in his unconscious,
the unadmitted symbol of a more
forceful and vital life. The
death-wish and the libido have,
as we know, a close relation in
psychoanalytic thought; Dracula

is the personification of those re-
pressed and sublimated sexual
urges which the rituals and cos-
tuies of this "civilized" society
attempted to cover up. Not to
have done so would have been
to acknowledge the potency of
what radically threatened the
embattled (self-) consciousness
of that culture. We know that
Rasputin-the word means "de-
bauchee"-could cure the sick
tsarevich, but just as really
could he undermine that lineage
and resist the murderous intent
of that dynasty whose last life-
blood he (figuratively speaking)
sucked dry: poisoned, shot,
bludgeoned-significantly by an
extreine right-wing faction-he
was still alive when they ended
up drowning him in the frozen
Neva. In like manner, Dracula
is always there to riseagain,
his lips newly smeared with
blood, his scarcely-veiled sexual-
ity as vibrant and frightening
as ever.
The Victorian bourgeois, we re-
call, dichotomized his sexist so-
cial-life: on the one hand, the
"compliant" housewife, on the
other the East-end whore. In
public discourse he paid lip-serv-
ice to a phoney morality and de-
nounced his private and seamy
underside. Dracula, his own re-
pressed id, was put beyond the
pale of even this private life -
cast and harangued as an outra-
geous intruder.
It is no coincidence that Sto-
ker (good bourgeois himself)
should emphasize Dracula's no-
bility. That Dracula should' be
graced with the charisma of
"Count" speaks volumes on this
bourgeoisie's class - conscious-
ness. In his social position as in
so much else, he is what the
bourgeois can never be and these

"respectable" hypocrites had
here-again, as in so much else
-an ambivalent attitude despite
their rhetoric. The vampire's ar-
istocratic life style is both be-
smirched and secretly envied by
a stodgy Protestant work ethic.
His nobility is simultaneously
raised on a pedestal by a cring-
ing bourgeois awe and pulled
down again (when he gefs his
come-uppance) in a vulgar class-
reading of "Pride comes before
a fall, you know. .. ." As such
Dracula connects with the aristo-
crat (or "gentleman") who sur-
faces in the earliest middle-class
novels as seducer and villain:
Once again, the combined envy
and fear bred by a more re-
stricted sociosexual norm. Though
Samuel Richardson's Lovelace
archetype prevails at least to
George Elliot's Donnithorne, by
our own time-when the middle
class has swallowed practically
all others-the seducer-killer will
have evolved from Dracula to
James Bond, where the aristo-
cratic residue is sustained in
the classy (sic) descrimination
he brings to the consumer-cap-
italist society he now effectively
safeguards: "Shaken, not stirred,
please. . ."
AND as regards that Protes-
L that ethic, who can doubt the
reasons for Dracula always be-
ing laid low by an image of the
cross? On one level it is, of
course, merely the most spec-
tacular metaphor of the Church's
long collusion with a repressive
State-that is to say, radical in-
surrection forestalled in the
name of Christian, (but class-
oriented) morality, or, if not so
much here, in the anaesthetizing
promise of a sweeter after-life.
Of course the Victorian busi-

nessman would have liked to
have been in there, biting the
neck of the wasp Anglo-Saxon
girl he is married to-or respect-
ably courting. Of course he would
have denied it. And I guess in
such literature these schizoid an-
tinomes come closest to a fusion
with Stevenson's slightly earlier
Dr. Jeklyy and Mr. Hyde. Clos-
est; but not close enough. For, if
at least it was recognized here
that the repressed id-and the up-
tight conscious self are likely to
be internalized 'in one and the
same person, the realization is
still subordinated to that doppel-
ganger stand-off which signifi-
cantly permeates all fin-de-siecle
literature.
DR. JEKYLL was wrong to be-
lieve himself the pure being
utterly distinct from the ugly Mr.
Hyde who has run beserk and
drunk with blood through the
pages of capitalist history. Now
as never before yve can see the
hairy paws clutching nervously
at the starched cuffs. Now I as
never before we should hear the
heart thudding impatiently be
neath the good Doctor's tight
vest. Now as never before we
should acknowledge Dracula in a
dialectical spirit, embrace him
even, as the liberator of inher-
ited socio-psychological hang-ups.
Who knows? Maybe if we hadn't
outlawed him, attempted to bury
him time and time again, we
would have avoided some of the
private frustrations and closet-
horrors still with us (at worst) in
the sexual assaults perpetrated
by sad sick men or (at best) in
the lines of men in dirty gray
raincoats who file into blue
movies.
Right. Now on to the next in-
terpretation. .

Films & ideology: Romance into business

Start your
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jewelry and department store..

KINO: A HISTORY OF THE
RUSSIAN AND SOVIET FILM,
by Jay Leyda. Collier Books, 501
panes, panerback, $4.95.
AMERICAN F I L M CRITI-
CISM: AN ANTHOLOGY, edited
by Stanley Kauffmann and
Bruce Henstell. Liveright, 443
pages, paperback, $3.95,
By NIGEL GEARING
EAN-LUC GODARD once said:
"If you wish, my own way of
denouncing the Soviet - American
collusion is to deplore the fact
that the present dream of the
Soviets is to imitate Hollywood
at the very moment the Ameri-
cans no longer have anything to
tell us." When he came to this
realization, he effectively threw
over those celluloid practices
which had made him perhaps
the most prestigious of contem-
porary film directors in the
Western world. It cannot have
been an easy decision and the
critical hositility to his subse-
quent movies has certainly not
made the transition any easier.
W h a t creates difficulties for
Godard and for all of us is a
Western ideology and aesthetic
which pretends so often to be
free of ideology.
We can recognize ideology all
right in the Soviet cinema but
less readily in 'our downtown
local movie theater: keep the
beam in your own eye long
enough and it will seem part of
the furniture. What compounds
the confusion is just what Godard
implies-the ultimate likeness of
two distinct national cinemas,
traditionally at odds with each
other but, in the long run (i.e.
by 1973) and beneath the rhe-
toric, essentially identical. How
two parallel lines can finally con-
verge is made clear to us in
these two excellent books-one
tracing the history of the Russian
movie from its birth to the death
of Eisenstein (1948), the other
collating significant American
film reviews from The Great
Train Robbery to Citizen Kane
(1941).
HE Kauffmann - Henstell an-
thology is better skimmed and
returned to than read cover to
cover. If (like this reviewer) you
take the second course, you end
up with some nostalgia for the
three-line New Yorker synopsis.
Nonetheless, to read it consecu-
tively is to note precisely that
evolution-or degeneration-sug-
gested above. Though no early
r e c o r d e d experiences of the
cinema here c o m p a r e with
Gorky's magnificent account( ap-

pended to the Leyda book), there
is a marvelous sense of wonder
and of hope in these first con-
frontations with so unfamiliar a
mediuin: wonder at the technical
possibilities, hope that here at
last (as with Whitman and litera-
ture forty years before) was a
genuinely democratic art form.
"The facts merely show," says
one reviewer of 1913, "that no
single factor in our modern
civilization has done more to
emphasize the brotherhood of
man than the motion picture..,.
The gallery and the orchestra
and the balcony have been
merged in one great audience,
which is none other than the
whole people without distinction
of class."
It is easy for us now to be
cynical about such hopes; how
much harder for those clear-
sighted few who sniffed out an
incipient rottenness a decade
even before the advent of the
talkie: "The Cabinet of Dr. Cali-
gari comes to us at a critical
period of our motion picture in-
dustry, when the public is jaded
by many inferior domestic pic-
tures and our producers them-
selves are still at a loss as to
how to get out of their rut." In-
timated here are a number of
things. A continuing controversy
over the relative qualities of

tives whose ideals are cramped
by the elastic bands which sur-
round their bank-rolls," that by
the time of Citizen Kane these
few h-ive multiplied, divided and
multiplied again like the sylphs
of a Busby Berkely musical:
"All Hollywood films are about
boys and girls with love trou-
bles, unless they are about char-
acter-actors disguisedtas famous
men." Or (of Kane itself), "You
have to go back to the days of
Griffith, and to the almost for-
gotten days of one or two Rus-
sian and German directors, to
catch that feeling of a sure hand
directing the course of the pic-
ture."
rTHE RUSSIAN evolution is
more complex and in some
ways more frustrating. As Leyda
points out in Kino, the earliest
film audiences in the Russian
movie theaters had a different
appearance from those in
American and other metropoli-
tan film centers. Before 1917,
film-going was definitely "a la
mode" - the amusement of the
Czar and his royal household (he
even had a private cinema the-
ater installed in his palace), the
pastime of the Russian upper
classes. His censorship of the
movies-she was appalled at the
thought of them reaching the low-

booksbooks

That we are better able to
gauge the clash between the
powers-that-be and the individual
artists in Russia than we are in
the U.S. is in large measure due
to the fact that all the major
Soviet directors committed their
ideals-realized or unrealized-to
print. Like their government par-
ticularly concerned for the edit-
cative possibilities of this art,
Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov, and
Dovzhenko were anxious to ar-
ticulate the problems of their
craft, though it seems less ready
to share an emergent emphasis
on content at the expense of
form. The Soviet administrators'
aversion to "formalism" pievails
to this day; in 1927 Mayakovsky
deemed t h e antiexperimental
bias an essential failing of any
art tied-as this one had already
become-to industry and monop-
oly. For "Hollywood" now read
"Sovkino." With the appointment
in 1930 of Shumyatsky as new
industrial administrator Eisen-
stein was to be disciplined,
"brought into line." Fortunately
for this director (it is the notice-
ably barren period of his artistic
life) Shumyatsky would be de-
nounced in a "Pravda" of 1938.
Fortunately, also, for any sub-
sequent Russian films, Shumyat-
sky was on the verge of realizing
plans for a "Soviet Hollywood"
to be built on the shores of the
Black Sea.
HE LAST part of Leyda's
book records the return in the
next ten years of nearly all the
original film creators who had
been displaced, and for all my
admiration of this book it is this
section (and its related value
judgments) which seems to me
questionable to the point of dis-
tortion. It is, of course, the per-
iod of the Second.World War, the
period of Alexander Nevsky and
Ivan the Terrible, the period
culturally dominated by the pro-
grams Qf Stalin and Zhdanov. If
Eisenstein was to be reinstated
to his former preeminence by the
Party, the government, and by
Stalin personally, one who didn't
return to his f o r m e r field of
achievement was Dziga Vertov.
If Leyda has "never understood"
Vertov's "later difficulties," it
is perhaps a related incompre-
hension which leads him so con-
spicuously to soft-pedal on the
damages wrought by this period's
administration, and to pass over
the regressive-albeit eminently
"orthodox"-character of Eisen-
stein's last films.
My guess is that Leyda is now
so much Our Man On Eisen-
stein (and I do not mean to be-
little his achievements in this
area) that he is more ready to
countenance a policy-maker who
favored his idol than denounce
that same autocrat who also
pushed a less reverenced, but
arguably greater, talent back out
in the cold. Leyda imputes to
Vetrov "a fanatic dependence on

than shooting a polehical line.
(Ironically; he had the best of
references: Engels had actually,
said as much: Marx implied it.)
Taking up that montage prin-
ciple fundamental to the greatest
Russian films, he extended it to
its logical and most courageous
extreme, thereby rejecting that
tendency to "filmed theatre"
which has continued to charac-
terize post-Griffith Hollywood and
which finally ensnared Eisen-
stein. Needless to say, his savage
and ever-purposeful editing of
newsreel material, his disdain for
the filmed story ("The scenario'
is ;a tale thought up for us by
literary people . . . Down with
the bourgeois tale-scenario! Hur-
rah for life as it is!") received
the "formalist" smear of those
dedicated - Eisenstein a, in o nlg
them-to a more tendentious,
more explicit cinema. His work
perhaps represents the most suc-
cessful attempt since the begin-
nings of film to evolve a purely
cinematic, nonliterary language.
As such it is the lost chord in
the increasingly palletable but-
synthetic harmonies of Soviet-
American cinema.
N AMERICAN Film Criticism
Paul Goodman is merely one-
but the most penetrating-of
those who lament, alongside the
corruptions of an industry, the
increased tendency toward this
no doubt polished, no doubt beau-
tifully photographed, but ulti-
mately uncinematic c i n e m a;
what he favors reads like a blue-
print for 'the Man with a Movie
Camera.
Contrast with this that percep-
tive commentator for The Nation
who, (almost too joyfully) sees
the skull beneath the skin of
Alexander Nevsky: "First-class
Hollywood with touches of Von
Sternberg and Von Strohein!
It has nothing to do with
'revolutionary art.' It is not
proof of Eisenstein's resurgence
but of his repression.
IN THE FINAL analysis I be-
lieve these two books bring
home to usdtruths we already
sensed behind those "transgres-
sions,". t h o s e "unorthodoxies"
created against the grain of the
industries that reluctantly gave
them life. Citizen Kane is as good
a place as any for Kauffmann
and Henstell to close their an-
thology: Hollywood closed its
ranks against Orson Welles, just
as, one may conjecture, the So-
viets would have closed their
ranks against any genuinely radi-
cal moves Eisenstein might have
made post-14946 but for his death
two years later. If the rest is
silence, it's because these worlds
go less often with the bang of
Kane than with the amplified,
negaphonic whimper of Ivan the
Terrible.
Today's writers . a
Jay Dillon holds forth at Cen-

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A m e r i c a n and non-American
products. ("Of course," notes one
unintentionally hilarious commen-
tator, "trash is too often pro-
duced on both sides of the ocean,
but American trash generally has
more novelty of ideas than for-
eign trash.")
Assessing Chaplin's A Woman
of Paris, a reviewer claims, "The
result is one of the few, in the
strictly artistic sense, fine mo-
tion pictures which have been
produced since that potential art
developed into an industry." An-
other--and, again, at the stag-
geringly early date of 1925-o'-
serves of D. W. Griffith and
Thomas IH. Ince: ' ,Both were
part of a romance that has be-
come a business." Little wonder
that if a considerable few can
complain in the 1920s of "cold-
blooded distributors, and execu-

er levels of his subjects-is para-
doxically the first instance of that
significance the Russian admin-
istrators would continue to ac-
credit to the medium. Come the
revolution, the interest has been
generated, but the ground has
been cleared anew. Writing of
his return from the Civil War,
Eisenstein recorded:
"We all came to the Soviet
cinema as something not yet
existent. We came upon no
ready-built city; there were no
squares, no streets laid out.
We pitched our tents and drag-
ged into camp our experiences
in varied fields . . . all were
pooled and went into the build-
ing of something that had as
yet no written traditions, no
e x a c t stylistic requirements,
nor even formulated demands."
Those varied fields-extending
to engineering (Eisenstein) and
chemistry (Pudovkin)-were fer-
tilized by the more strictly
"aesthetic" experiences of May-
akovsky, Gorky, and Meyerhold,
and nourished by the fluke im-
port in 1919 of D. W. Griffith's
Intolerance. The American film,
especially its montage technique,
lave tremendous aesthetic and

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