Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
7 ago 2007
If you think of certain classic fllm directors (Bergman, Hitchcock, Buñuel), the element in their films that is the most dated, cringe-worthy at times, is a kind of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism.
Gary, Lori Lubeski, and I all had this professor at SF State University, Robin Gajdusek (bless his heart) who LOVED that stuff -- although I suppose his take was strictly speaking more Jungian than Freudian. "When the LINE meets the CIRCLE" was his most memorable teaching phrase. We all laughed at him -- Lori and I in the same class, Gary perhaps a year later... I think I still have the paper I wrote for his class on Hitchcock the sadist...
Freud is *everywhere* in the arts of the first two thirds of the 20th century. Even Pound, who hated him, echoes him with his brilliant apothegm, "All ages are contemporaneous in the mind." Even "Hello, Dolly," (well, Thornton Wilder wrote the play from which it was adapted), with Horace VanderGelder's equation of money and manure, that if you pile up and horde the manure it makes a big stink, but if you spread it around it helps things grow -- that's pure Freud, with his equation of money = excrement. (Well, it's a purely American optimistic and witty re-working of a Freudian trope.)
But I'm with you on the movie guys. Wilder and Pound don't embarrass me with their Freudianism (though Wilder's "Skin of Our Teeth" might have; don't remember; should re-read), but the arty movie makers do.
5 comentarios:
Gary, Lori Lubeski, and I all had this professor at SF State University, Robin Gajdusek (bless his heart) who LOVED that stuff -- although I suppose his take was strictly speaking more Jungian than Freudian. "When the LINE meets the CIRCLE" was his most memorable teaching phrase. We all laughed at him -- Lori and I in the same class, Gary perhaps a year later... I think I still have the paper I wrote for his class on Hitchcock the sadist...
Resistance, maybe?
Freud is *everywhere* in the arts of the first two thirds of the 20th century. Even Pound, who hated him, echoes him with his brilliant apothegm, "All ages are contemporaneous in the mind." Even "Hello, Dolly," (well, Thornton Wilder wrote the play from which it was adapted), with Horace VanderGelder's equation of money and manure, that if you pile up and horde the manure it makes a big stink, but if you spread it around it helps things grow -- that's pure Freud, with his equation of money = excrement. (Well, it's a purely American optimistic and witty re-working of a Freudian trope.)
But I'm with you on the movie guys. Wilder and Pound don't embarrass me with their Freudianism (though Wilder's "Skin of Our Teeth" might have; don't remember; should re-read), but the arty movie makers do.
Dated is *good*. Think: Janet Gaynor, Al Jolsen, Tony Curtis.
... It's the energy and innovation of the argument more than the argument itself.
(That might be Sorrentino talking.)
It's that supercharged atmosphere of "seriousness" that I'm referring to. *Dated* can be a good thing, but then these films are experienced as camp.
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