Viktor Shklovsky: Their Moment

This poetic word is a dance, a move made at the instant of a psychic shift; it is not a move made to accomplish a task. An artistic work in which an aesthetically differentiated sensibility lies beyond the word--where the word is neglected, where it is unsensed or no longer sensed--is possible. The discord may be then transferred to the interior of the word itself.

Hans Jenny Jahnn: Evening

The 17th of November.  A dreary day, filled with empty shadows.  The clouds are shapeless; they hang against the sky like burlap.  Evening comes early, numb, in a fogless haze.  The world is quiet; only   the sound of people is loud.  You go out walking, you ask yourself questions -- you ask whether there will ever be another day like this one -- one just as vague and dim -- with the same beginnings, those born today, the deaths, the innumerable acts of lustful procreation, the reckonings of fate, the coincidences, the recently launched endeavors and decisions.  You get no answer.  You cannot provide an answer.

[From <i>Jeden ereilt es</i> (It Catches Up With Everyone), translated from the German by Adam Siegel.]

Hans Henny Jahnn

Christoph Bauer: Hans Henny Jahnn

life is the transgression of a prescribed order rather than the order itself.  jahnn's eroticism adheres to no known conventional norms; instead it invents new rituals that have less to do with the compulsive violation of taboos than with the discovery of an individualized sensuality which goes beyond arousal, penetrating, fucking, procreating.  jahnn's sexual innuendos are objectionable only insofar as the imaginative power of the reader of either gender forbids certain individual longings, with sexuality serving ultimately as imperative for a harmony that seems unable to satisfy purely spiritual needs.  the uncertainty, the fear, the forlornness of each individual leads a sensual frenzy.  a man wants to be embraced, even by his murderer.  one almost feels jahnn's figures trembling in all their nordic restraint.  their passions are as unexplored as the most distant planets.  jahnn's eroticism is neither the dogmatic agony of a marquis de sade, nor the metaphysical pornography of a george bataille, nor the theological piquancy of a klossowski, but a lengthy exploration of the often scarcely perceptible sources of passion, which in this respect include both hate and love.

[Christoph Bauer, in: Jahnn lesen: Fluß ohne Ufer (Ulrich Bitz, ed. Hanser, 1993) 201-202.]

Viktor Shklovsky: Their Moment III

Allow me to propose the following: the relationship between the subject being filmed and the film shot itself is very nearly constant.  In the literary work this relationship is not consant, and the difference is determined by the creative will of the artist.

Viktor Shklovsky: Their Moment II

It is Vera who is the waterline in Tolstoy’s novel.  Everything else in the novel is written "wrong."  And this "wrongness" is elaborated by hundreds of parallels between a given storyline and another.

Viktor Shklovsky: Their Moment

"The Basic Laws of the Shot"

The significance of the subject-matter will be discussed here in its narrow sense.  Most of the content of this chapter is devoted to the absence of an underlying shift in film.

In literature there is the word; between word and object lies denomination.  Film starts with photography, where the artistic event is absent.  Although Eisenstein refers to this as a set factory (correlating to things visualized by the artist), as of yet a “literature” in film--that is, a framework of assumptions that predetermine the nature of our perceptions—is missing.

The fact that a given actor -- Jacky Coogan, for example -- can play the same role --a boy lost and found by his parents – over and over again and never actually play any other type of role at all means that any qualitative difference sensed by the audience is not to be found in the role itself.

Here is the question: What is the molecule of film, the molecule of its artistic sensibility, the scaffolding of sensation in film?

Here is the question: What is the molecule of film, the molecule of its artistic sensibility, the scaffolding of sensation in film?

(Viktor Shklovsky, Ikh nastoiashchee, M: 1927. Translated from the Russian by Adam Siegel)