On Wed, 24 Nov 1999 11:03:42 -0500 William Stoneking <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The interesting thing to me is the synchronicity of ideas at > diverse places among diverse people... Eisenstein and > Pound never met, nor, do I believe, did they ever correspond > or read each other's theories... I would've thought this a fruitful > area of inquiry for those whose tastes run in the direction of > maggotry! What do we know about the source of Pound's ideogrammic idea? I would have guessed that it was only crystallized by him reading Fenollosa, and that the roots of the idea were central to the symbolism that Pound was coming out of. The objects being placed side by side in his theory themselves being symbols of a kind. In contrast, montage suited the Soviets because it fitted with dialectical thinking. So unless there is common ground between symbolism and Marx/Hegel, it looks like a coincidence. I admire the film writer David Thomson, who knocks Eisenstein's writing as dogmatic and instead quotes Alexandre Astruc, embracing montage as only one element in how a film works. Under this approach to film criticism, also shared by Manny Farber, it is crucial to The Big Sleep that Bogart happens to pause for a fraction of a second while crossing the street. A detail like this, and not the idea of montage, is what Pound was keen on, if what he admired in a film was its "enormous correlation of particulars". The same compendious "solid solidity" (if that was the phrase) that he admired in Flaubert. Peter