Hart Crane

During this week's seminar I mentioned the poetry of Hart Crane, and in particular his evocation of the Brookly Bridge in The Bridge (1930). In the Proem to the poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane writes:

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;


The stanza describes the "thought" of the cinema as a moment of transport: a sleight (trick), an experience of "multitudes . . . bent toward" (turned to, oriented by, organised through) a scene that bears repetition, and points to the future. It's an interesting image to sit beside the experience of the "Masstransiscope" artwork we discussed. From Walt Whitman ("Manhatta") to Masstransiscope, an aesthetic trajectory complements the experience of cinematic modernity.

You can read "To Brooklyn Bridge" here.

This is the cover of the first edition of The Bridge, with photographs by Walker Evans. Note the way in which the material of the bridge comes to look almost abstract, a migration we discussed as symptomatic of the conversion of shapes to objects (and back) in Ruttmann.

My City of Sydney

In a seminar last week, I mentioned this time capsule, the closing message Channel 7 showed in the 70s and 80s. Tommy Leonetti, the singer, hosted a variety show, but for many this was his most memorable moment on Australian television. Leonetti was American.



The song observes a similar logic to the "city symphony" albeit in miniature, offering a variety of perspectives on the cinematic liveliness of the city's arteries and nodal points. Its nightclub ambience and topographical drift from the Harbour to the Cross orients the viewer to her city as a place of adult recreation, which seems odd since it immediately precedes the cartoon of a kangaroo putting her joey to bed, kawaii before its time. Perhaps its implication is that the night-time, and so sleep, is an adult playground, one which ties it directly to the surrealistic dreamscapes we are investigating this fortnight. Sweet cosmopolitan dreams!

The dating of the clip is ambitious; the Opera House is still under construction (so it's pre-1973), and Tommy's outfit suggests to me we are on the cusp of the seventies. To give you an idea of the way in which this clip oriented the feeling of being a "Sydneysider" in the 70s, you might want to watch the punk cover by XL Capris, also at YouTube. Frenzal Rhomb also did a cover, in the 90s.