>> "But the true test of one's
>> understanding, in my opinion, would be to reach the point where one has
>> absorbed the work and understood Pound's thinking so thoroughly that one
>> can use his innovations as the basis for creating new work.  It seems in
>> some respects rather discouraging that the first person to succeed in
>> this task has been a filmmaker rather than a writer."
>
>You obviously do not have Stalin's love of movies, but awonderful sense of
>hyberbole and the absurb. Mr Soderbergh, the first?  I don't think so...
>let us nominate Eisenstein if anyone, though I suspect you pass him by
>more from the techincal deficicies of film at that period (compared to now).
>But this was a simultaneous evolution. Eisenstein was NOT influenced by
>Pound or vice versa.
>
>If you wanna start nominating film directors why overlook Ford (The
>Searchers),
>or Mr Hitchcock (the "Pound" of suspense), or dare I say it? Ingmar
>Bergmann.
>And there are more.
 
Have you actually seen THE LIMEY?  Do make a point of seeing it when it
finally gets to Australia.
 
Thanks for the referrals to John Ford and Ingmar Bergman.  I've never
looked at their films from the point of view of noticing the editing.
References to specific Bergman films would be appreciated.
(Incidentally, John Ford worked in an era when directors did not have
control over the editing of their films; the editor was responsible to
the studio, not to the director.  However unlike most directors of the
classical Hollywood period, Ford did not provide ample "coverage" for
his scenes, so the film had to be edited pretty much the way Ford
wanted it because those were the only shots the editor had to choose
among.)
 
Others, including myself, have previously mentioned Eisenstein and
Hitchcock in connection with the Cantos.  In particular, I will mention
again the famous shower scene in psycho, where Hitchcock put together
something like 175 different shots to produce about 45 seconds worth of
screen time and was able to effectively show a murder in a shower without
using any explicit violence or nudity.  This is certainly a lot like
Pound's technique in the Cantos.
 
However Soderbergh's film THE LIMEY is like the Cantos in some ways that
Hitchcock and Eisenstein are not.  For one thing, there is the fugue-like
way that certain images keep recurring.  Soderbergh is certainly not the
first to do this, either in film or written narration, but I think he
carries it to an extreme that few other writers and directors have.
 
The more important point, though, is that editing such as that in
Hitchcock's shower scene is still much more linear than what Pound does
in the Cantos.  In reading the Cantos, in many ways one has to give up
one's attachment to logic as the imagery shifts thousands of miles and
hundreds of years without any apparent justification.  And Soderbergh
does the same sort of thing in THE LIMEY, which is probably one of the
reasons it has not been all that successful at the box office.
 
Two characters are having a conversation in a kitchen and then, as one
continues to hear one of the characters talking, there is a shift to a
non-speaking close up image of that same character.  And then
as the conversation continues, there is an image of the other character
sitting in an airline seat, and then a shift to both characters riding
together in a car, but still continuing the same conversation.  To me,
anyway, it seems that the demands Soderbergh is making of the viewer
are very like the demands Pound makes on his readers.
 
>Writers?  PiO in Melbourne has developed a rigrous and original poetry of
>inner-city Melbourne migrants utilising voice and dialect in a way that
>Pound (by comparison) only hinted at, and yet Pi's poetry is very definitely
>a major innovation that has its source in Pound's poetry. The list of poets
>is in fact endless!
 
Thanks for the tip.  I'll try to get around to learning about Pi
eventually.
 
--Lee Lady   <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>